A paper presented to the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology, 2 November 2021
GEORGE Steiner who died in Cambridge just last year at the age of 90, was a Jewish literary critic and philosopher whose sensitivity to Catholic Christianity inflects his magnificent essay, Real Presences, which I am discussing today. We must read him, as much as we are able as Christians, within the frame of the Holocaust, humbled by the courageous depth of his appreciation of the civilization in which the Holocaust happened: Christendom. I want in this paper to show how his own religious literacy enabled Steiner’s devastating critique of postmodernism and the way deconstruction has – chillingly – succeeded in its aim of undermining the vast Christian cultural legacy on which we exist. Postmodernism may be defined as an intellectual movement that regards all truth claims as totalitarian. It was just taking off at the time Steiner gave this essay as a lecture in 1985.[1] He was intent upon a compassing of a civilization going to waste after a hundred years of “deconstruction”; deconstruction which began in the nineteenth century and reached its high-water mark towards the end of the twentieth. Steiner used historic theological categories throughout his work, all the while writing as a philosopher, secular journalist and literary critic writing post-Holocaust. His amazing sensitivity to the “necessary possibility” as he puts it (3),[2] of the creative Logos, forms the keystone of Real Presences. By the end of the paper I hope to have demonstrated the redemptive potential of this work, rooted in an extraordinary synthesis of Jewish and Christian intuition. Steiner attempts valiantly a scoping of the possibility of meaning itself; meaning that gave the old Europe its energy. Meaningfulness existed, and it was religious (225), even if we ought to be silent now in the aftermath of the Holocaust which seems to deny all hope, and therefore all linguistic content. Meaning exists/existed in the pact of word and world. That pact means that reality exists, and is enfleshed and was and is hopeful. It is both messianic and incarnational. But Steiner’s messianism always has a lower-case “m”. And thereby lies the terrible strange and tragic vacuum, the awesome cosmic silence that ultimately confronts us as followers of the Word, in this brilliant work.
First then, a few biographical notes.
Francis George Steiner was born in Paris, France on 23 April 1929, and died in Cambridge, UK, on 30 February 2020. His father, a Viennese financier, saw the writing on the wall and moved the family from Vienna – first to France and then presciently to America – before the second world war in 1940. Steiner’s academic career was stratospheric and multilingual: he became Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the University of Geneva (1974–94), Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow in the University of Oxford (1994–95), Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (2001–02). And he was the first professor of literature at the new Churchill College, Cambridge. He saw himself as belonging nowhere, but a guest of everywhere. He was an avowed Jewish intellectual, but one who hated Zionism and poured scorn on the “parochialism” of “little Israel”.[3] He adored the fecundity and brilliance of Western civilization, yet abhorred the idea of nationhood to which it had given rise. To him the nation prevented the necessary universal perspective and respect for norms. Yet nationhood is a phenomenon that owes its existence largely to the possibilities of shared language which the Christian invention of printing made possible, and which gave Steiner his prestige as an academic. Language was the very bedrock of the idea of “the West” which so fascinated him. He revelled in the life of the mind, yet criticized those like Derrida who obsessed over philosophy to the neglect of its art or music. He was reviled and revered in equal measure: he stands in line with the great Hebrew prophets whose radical critique of rulers and principalities was salvific. Real Presences is for me a most holy book, up there with T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, which in parts it strongly evokes and seems to have been nourished by.
What is not so well-known about Steiner is that he started as a journalist, spending four of the “happiest years of his life” on The Economist in London, from the age of 23.[4] He also contributed more than one hundred pieces to the New Yorker and Times Literary Supplement magazines that he never collected and re-published. Indeed, he was senior book reviewer at the New Yorker from 1966 until 1997. It is from a position of authority, and with some self-deprecating irony therefore, that he laments “the genius of the age” … as being “that of journalism” (26). It “anaesthetizes” with its “monotone of graphic urgency”, he complains (27). It articulates an epistemology and ethics of “spurious temporality” (26). “We are made whole again, and expectant, in time for the morning edition” he says, sounding very Prufrockian (27). We have to bear this in mind as we consider his demolition of the so-called “secondary city” of scribblers, which is the title of the first of the three sections of the book.
Real Presences started life as the Leslie Stephen Memorial Lecture given before the University of Cambridge on 1 November 1985 when he was 56. Leslie Stephen was one of the most famous agnostics of his day, and that is fitting. He was a renounced Anglican priest, essayist, and father of Virginia Woolf.
The crux of Steiner’s masterpiece is that words are not any longer understood as describing the world. And it is – and I quote – this “break in the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself” (93). This is perhaps the greatest key in contemporary literature to understanding our present culture wars. As students of Lesslie Newbigin, we know well that for our contemporary culture, there is now no truth to be known, only what is “true for you”. What we say is not meant to be borne out necessarily by what we do. Sexual ethics are a private matter for politicians. And so on. For Steiner, the “full experience of created sense” has gone, and along with it our very ability to be human. What has been lost is nothing less than that “wager on God” (4) without which meaning cannot be made, because meaning, like art, is predicated upon the expectation of response. But all communication is “answerable”, because God made Himself answerable by creating humanity. But post-deconstruction, words can mean more or less anything we want them to mean. They have been evacuated of inherent worth.
MARK Krupnick, Professor of Religion and Literature at University of Chicago Divinity School notes that Steiner has been led “close to the edge of a specifically Christian affirmation” by the logic of his defence of old Europe.[5] There is in it, he says, a “kind of incarnationist aesthetic”. The book’s title after all deliberately evokes the medieval Church and its affirmation of the “real presence” of Christ’s body and blood in the wafer and wine of the Eucharist. And the book’s cover is Georges de la Tour’s Christ in the Carpenter Shop, holding a light to his father’s work bench.
Steiner’s oeuvre concerns the status of language and the humanities in the wake of the political bestiality of the last century. There is precious little overtly about this bestiality in Real Presences, and amazingly almost nothing overt about the Holocaust. There doesn’t need to be. It is the vast shadow around the very act of thinking, in which the small light of hope should surely have gone out. Instead, the book’s focus is on the Jewish diaspora itself, and what Steiner calls the “strange fruit” of its perpetual deferral of messianism. If the Word is no longer answerable, nothing can be said. If God is dead, surely the Holocaust is the logical consequence. It is perhaps not surprising to find that his Jewish interlocutors either ignore the book in their interviews with him, or concentrate only on the Holocaust dimension of it. But Steiner was heroically going behind the Holocaust in his curiosity about the creative rather than the destructive force of old Europe.
There are but two epochs for Steiner: that of the epoch extending from the pre-Socratic to the later nineteenth century as constituted by “the saying of being”; or realism. The real is sayable. What is there can be expressed. From then on we are living post-theologically, losing our moorings in the vast sweep of the civilizational story, where all study, once predicated upon its forebears, now floats free, lost with the Death of God, where we now live “after the Word”. For Steiner deconstruction began at the end of the nineteenth century, with its loss of faith and a furious unpicking of what had been common currency in culture. Roger Scruton defines deconstruction as the attempt to “mount a comprehensive critique of Western culture, and to propose a method for studying the products of that culture which will neutralize their claim to authority.”[6] It tries to abolish “logocentrism”. Logocentrism means being is sayable. Speech acts because for Christians, the Word created the world. The great Johannine enunciation of this truth at the beginning of his Gospel is the almost unfathomable insight that God created the world through the Word who became flesh and lived our life with us. Deconstruction seeks to abolish the speaker of the word, privileging, as oddly does Islam also, the written word or text alone. As such it is Christian-hating, audacious and to Steiner, absurd.[7] The very word “person” itself is derived from the Latin per-sonare – the one through whom speaking is sounded. (Simon Weightman, head of religious studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies used often to note that the idea of “embodiment” in our society is often derailed by a fetish for representation.)
It is intriguing for a journalist that Steiner says “the saying”, and not the “reading”, or the “writing” of being. To get a sense of the import of this is to get the tiniest glimpse of what we may have lost since the Gutenberg Revolution. For American media guru Marshall McLuhan, who said “the medium is the message”, the printed word made scribbling hermits of us all. It created Protestantism and all its sects; even affected our ability to make community together. For Steiner, who championed McLuhan, the scribblers are the secondary city, parasitic on the primacy of true art. McLuhan and Steiner throw interesting light on one another’s deeply felt religious passion for the same thing, but from different orientations.
THERE is far more in the book than can be said in any critique of it. It practices what it preaches, which is to build upon as much of what has gone before as can be encompassed. Its cultural references are so vast and so dense and mutually reinforcing, that any reading necessarily risks bearing out merely the predilections of its readers. But that’s the point. Like living scripture, it seems different with each reading; its many-layered depths consonant with the maturity of the reader and with whatever is preoccupying one at any given moment.
Steiner’s opening premise is stunningly unambiguous however. Our culture has gone wrong. The “enigma of creation” has been lost. We have buried God in verbiage! The primary city of creativity as a direct response to the givenness of creation (datur, non intelligetur) has been submerged in a secondary city of useless critique and punditry (and journalists are one of the prime culprits).[8]
Art is a critical act, a response to life. It is “inspired” as opposed to “discursive”. That there was always scholarly comment and interpretative discourse from the classical era onwards is true, but for Steiner, to take just one of a thousand possible examples, the close referencing in Dante’s Purgatorio of the Aenid tells of “the felt limits of the classical in regard to Christian revelation”, and builds on it, not merely rejects it. By comparison, “[t]here is no critical-academic equivalent”. The modern phenomenon – what Blake called “the dark Satanic mills” of the university system grinding out its hopeless anti-Christianity[9] – is what it is since it parts company with tradition, continuity, and above all theology. It is not part of any grand narrative in which all may share [depending on their level of education of course]. It feeds promiscuously and voraciously upon its own contemporaneity without discrimination, even as it peddles its feeble wares in the name of “democracy”. It is above all “American”. It is not part of that “answering form” that “energizes into creative responsibility”; there is almost no sense of answering to anything precedent that characterizes true scholarship. Steiner wants us to see that we live at a time of cultural deprivation, of epochal time-wasting, with barely any time for access to the primary, dependent as we are upon the approval of the second-rate gatekeepers of material success.
Americanization for Steiner is constituted by two things: immanence and egalitarianism.[10] Both result ineluctably in contempt and blindness for what has gone before. There is no strategy of exclusion – how could there be? – no canonical sense. “The past matters [to America] in direct reference to its usability in and by the present” (p. 32). In support of this withering indictment, we might notice how Facebook, which now impacts the emotional as well as business lives of a third of the world’s population,[11] purports to be enhancing our relations, our lived response to life itself, but is in fact feeding off it, driven by advertising. It harvests the data of our lives for profit. It is the same parasitism masquerading as light that McLuhan laments as “Luciferan” in electronic communications.[12] Electric communications ape the unifying, embodying work of the Holy Spirit.[13]
There are two reasons for the “grey morass” of secondary literature: 1) the “professionalization of the academic pursuit and appropriation of the liberal arts” – which means jobs for everyone. And 2) the humanistic imitation of the scientific, which has a lot to do with the university funding cycle, and the need for self-justification that can be tabulated and quantified. He lambasts the whole university experience – no wonder he was so loathed in the senior common rooms of Cambridge, according to one of my sources. He accuses his donnish colleagues of a “craven” need for “remission from direct encounter with the ‘real presence’.” “We welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation” (39), he says, (while enjoying a fabulous career himself in the academy).
This is nonetheless writing with the force of Old Testament prophecy. And like the prophets, Steiner directs his ire first at his own. The Talmudic method, the habit formed of the vast exegesis of Jewish law and legend that replaced Temple worship from the second century of the Christian or Common Era, set the pattern for our times. The Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD. What replaced it was exegesis. Gentiles must tread with care here, but not blindfolded, I trust, for this is the nub of the book and it is holy ground. Says Steiner: “Out of Judaism grown impatient at the everlasting delay of the messianic came strange fruit. Today, this impatience has taken on extreme, nihilistic urgency. It questions the very concepts of meaning and of form. It queries the possibility of any significant relations between word and world” (86f) and it is this profound insight that the rest of the book addresses.
WHAT he criticizes as “hermeneutic unendingness” in postmodernism draws its method from three moments of history. Talmudic exegesis is the first of these three. “[i]n dispersion, the text is homeland … This reading without end represents the foremost guarantee of Jewish identity” (41). The Mosaic prohibition against images, the “immemorial Jewish diffidence in the face of the act of creation, renders so much scholarship mere commentary, rather than a shaping of aesthetic form” (41).
The second historical moment at which the relations between the primary and secondary are argued in depth is medieval scholasticism which also threatened obsessive unendingness. But succeeding popes put an end to it, with Bulls invoked to insist on finality. The reason finality was possible for scholasticism was, says Steiner, that “there is a strict, utterly mysterious temporality in the coming and ministry of Christ” (44). Christ came in actual time and in an actual place that are known. For Steiner that crucially “stabilizes eternity”. “The alternative is Satanic chaos” (44). This is a terribly strong rebuke against America in particular, to its secularizing exegetes, and to Derrida in particular. Steiner had considerable respect for Derrida, but dismissed deconstructionism in his Edinburgh Festival 50th Anniversary Lecture as “jugglers’ ingenuities”. [14] Deconstructionism is sleight of hand, but convincing enough to the modern academy to mean it is now barely possible to say anything with auctoritas or finality; to mean anything at all. If Christ does not live, neither can we be rid of the chaos and evil of unendingness.
It is at this point that Steiner seems to be echoing McLuhan who lamented the print revolution for fragmenting what the Church had fought so hard to unify. Accessible printed texts made and continue to make heresy possible. They made silent reading at high speed possible.[15] Before, the text was not read by all, but heard by all, in the form of vernacular sermons moderated by the speaker’s personhood enfleshed in his life, his voice and his inflection.[16] Steiner says something similar: “The Roman Catholic warning that interpretation without end … will modulate, first into historical criticism, next into more or less metaphoric deism, and lastly, into agnosticism, is logically and historically valid. Where it is without finiteness, secondary discourse is schismatic” (45). For McLuhan, print creates sects: which is his dismissive term for all non-Catholic Christian religion: he says, “[A]coustic or tribal man reacts like a deviant or Protestant, a rebel, when he opposes the centralized bureaucracies and legalistic hierarchies which we inherited from the alphabet”.[17] Reading made Protestants of us all, and though God chose to give us the Gospel during the literate age of Greek civilization, says McLuhan, nonetheless mass proliferation of texts broke up the church.
There is a third moment of self-conscious awareness of the importance of the relations between the primary and the secondary. And it is psychoanalysis; and the application of Freudian methodology to art and literary criticism (45ff). And here we are back among the diaspora. There is no known way of putting a stop to the connections being made by the patient and his memories, or the secularized literary critic and her text or, as he amusingly puts it, “the buried intentionalities and self-betrayals of the musical composition” (46) “The archaeology of sense is as vertical, it is as much directed towards the de profundis, as is that of Talmudic exegesis from which so much of the spirit of Freud’s hermeneutics was derived” (47), says Steiner.
Section ii – “The Broken Contract”
Both Steiner and McLuhan fixed on the power and religious modalities of speech and text as the locus of power to enlighten, unify or destroy.
So to the second section of the book. Steiner now sets out to falsify deconstructionism with a welter of evidence from his élite reading of the Western canon. It is obvious that words can – or can be made to – do anything. Human beings have the utter freedom, and the privacy, to say anything at all. But it is also obvious that that fact does not affect the truth. Truth and beauty are quite clearly not dependent upon mass education or democratization of taste, or proliferation of accessibility. Paradoxically, the reverse is the case. Certainly, there are “inadmissible propositions” – that Mozart was tone deaf for instance – which nonetheless have no bearing on verifiability. So Steiner makes short work of semiotics where words are deemed to shift in meaning, deemed not to carry any responsible freight other than what the speaker intends or the hearer understands; referring merely to other words in a kind of endless, meaningless loop. This notion resulted for a while in UK in “third way thinking” during the Blair era, where a thing was so just because you said it was so; or by appeal to numbers.[18] The fact is that over time, “[t]he canon is forged and perpetuated by the few” (68). Steiner is saying that there is an inherent authority in the truth as expressed in art, music or classical literature which comes to govern the way we live in our bodies. This is beautifully expressed: “Vermeer’s treatments of fabric have schooled our fingertips” (63). It is the same point he makes earlier about “ingestion” – for Ben Jonson a “visceral, personal encounter and appropriation” (24). “The otherness enters into us and makes us human” (188).Texts memorised “generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows” (9). The word and the body are vitally, incarnationally reciprocating. Oh would modern educationists understand the soul-saving power of learning poetry by heart.
Steiner now sets his sights ever more sharply on the ploys of language “theorists” whose various stratagems deplete the mysterious power of the word by applying to it various reductionist ideas borrowed from science, or from gaming, that lose touch with reality (85). But “[n]one of these proposals persuades. No interpretative method has bridged the gap between linguistic analysis and linguistic theory properly defined on the one hand, and the process of understanding on the other” (82). He does not begrudge the effort made: Steiner may be irascible and even contemptuous, but he relishes the intellectualising of a good argument as he says in his interview with Laure Adler: “For me to be a Jew . . . means to be trying every morning to be someone who learns something new. For me, to be a Jew is to remain a student, to be someone who learns. . . It’s to have an intellectual, moral, spiritual vision. . .”[19]
And this maybe explains the energy in the book – an essay that does not shirk the effort to compass the “semantic potential of innovation and inexhaustibility” – which is not the same as unendingness. This huge appreciation of the gift that art and literature and above all music are; the effort in his straining towards semantic possibility, is something he takes personally: as if he alone must strain to mend it, or die of a broken heart.
So, in section one, Steiner sets out the problem: that truth is no longer sayable, and too much of the intellectual ferment of our culture is a participating in truth’s destruction.
In section two, we looked at who has created the problem: and how successful or not are their strategies. Steiner shows how shallow, brittle, deceptive and deadly are these strategies.
Section III – “Presences”
SECTION three out to mend what has been broken; to recover meaning, even as hope is delayed. And here Steiner is at his most overtly theological, at least until the very end. The section begins assertively, retrieving categories, pronouncing judgement on the arrogant cowardly pretension of “the masters of the academy”. “There is” – after all, he says – “language, there is art, because there is ‘the other’” (137). And who is this other? Ultimately, it is none other than the messiah (again that elliptical, lower case ‘m’). “For in the messianic dispensation, every semantic motion and marker would become perfectly intelligible truth; it would have the life-naming, life-giving authority of great art when it reaches the one for whom it is uniquely intended . . .” (138). And he fleshes the notion by saying “ . . . our cities [are] different after Balzac and Dickens” (164).
History, then, and all classical art, is the history of meaning. All the more shattering then to find at the end of the book a pulling back from the force of his own intuited conclusions; just the whisper of modish relativism that almost makes one gasp. There is pure doxology throughout this final section: quotation after quotation from Dante, Shakespeare, D H Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot which transcend annihilation: citations he juxtaposes with the banalities of atheist philosophers like Bertrand Russell, whom he accuses of being “metaphysically tone-deaf” (228). And then, the greatest banality and betrayal of all being his own, as if, in his own historic loyalties, he cannot betray the very lostness he has seemed so magnificently to have transcended. He writes: “What I affirm is the intuition that where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable” (229). Surely prophetic and true, but then he adds: “ . . . no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose ‘nerve and blood’ are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if” (229). This does not deny that there is, in all art, and even in all philosophical speculation, something, however inert, of the divine but that which does not acknowledge its givenness misses the mark. How does art and literature that are not produced “as if”, get produced at all? This is a crucial if on the face of it “foolish” question (223) to which he seems to struggle to give an answer: “As there is trivial, opportunistic literature and music, so there is modern art which is mere shadow-boxing, which only mimes, with more or less technical brio, a genuine struggle with emptiness … [W]here the frankly theological is so largely held in derision … it is immensely difficult for an artist to find words for his making, for the “vibrations of the primal” which quicken his work. Nonetheless, he adds, “major art in our vexed modernity has been, like all great shaping before it, touched by the fire and the ice of God” (223).
That is the best that can be hoped, as educated opinion has entered upon the new freedom of a scientific-secular world. And with that “as if”, all that may be left is religious fundamentalism and kitsch (230).
It is that insidious two-letter word “we” that makes me worry. Has Steiner after all capitulated to the zeitgeist? It is problematic. The hope of Easter Sunday that he acknowledges on the very last page is “analogous” only (232). Non-believers must continue to wait in an endless Saturday [Sabbath?] of “suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand, and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other” (232). Having built his essay upon the Christian categories of meaning, he dispenses with the Sunday of Resurrection as “a dream, a Utopia” where “presumably the aesthetic will no longer have logic or necessity” (23). This is a quite bizarre refusal of all that has energised the writing of this lecture; all that has been said. Certainly “the lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope – there is no word less deconstructible” (232), he acknowledges. But he has deconstructed it! And he even mimics and inverts T S Eliot, the greatest of Christian poets of the century in question, in his final flourish. Where Eliot in Little Gidding, writes his famous paeon of hope in the Holy Spirit and the incarnation, quoting Mother Julian’s famous lines:
“All shall be well and
All manner of thing [stet] shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
Steiner implies that the fire is the Holocaust. He writes, in the same portentous poetic tone: “The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian” (232).
Is Steiner just as much a “eunuch”, his word for the critic (152), a creature of the “secondary city”, as any of those whom he despises? Isn’t he after all, tragically and wilfully dependent upon the Logos, on the language and intuitions that produced all that he so lauds in the long continuities of Western civilization, and that have been laid so tragically to waste by the nihilistic thinking he excoriates? “Politically, morally perhaps, little, very little in this twentieth century, one of the cruellest, most wasteful of hope in human record, gives motive for anything but a lucid ‘forgetting about’ God” (228).
In conclusion
Real Presences presents us with the very thing Steiner denies as a possibility: an unanswerable question: “Why has the messiah not come?” The consequences, the truth of this in light of Steiner’s mighty investment to capture the reason for the West’s brilliance are too terrible even for us to think. We must read Real Presences with religious literacy to confront the truth as it embraces us all: truth both terrible and beautiful, and ultimate – and then go about our mission again. We must end the unending.
Has Steiner tried to square the circle? Have his cake and eat it? Bear witness to a civilization built on a hope he intuits but dare not NOT deny? Is hope even possible now? Steiner’s courage in writing this book does not seem to offer more than an ambivalent eschatology. But in the end it is choice we can make and must make.
As Christians I believe the following questions must be addressed as a matter of the greatest seriousness: a word Steiner emphasised (225).
What is the contemporary salience of the Logos for our mission to postmodernism? Can meaning be recovered, only as if God existed?
What is the significance for post-moderns of the Christian theology of the relationship of speech and text? Does Steiner throw light on this?
Can Christians ever really legitimately address the meaning of this book?
Where is hope for Steiner?
Thank you.
[1] Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, although published in French in 1967, was not translated until 1976.
[2] Stand-alone numbers in the text refer to page numbers in Real Presences.
[3] Interview with Laure Adler, You Need To Read This George Steiner Interview – The Forward for magazine Forward, 27 March 2017, accessed 18 October 2021; an interview that curiously makes no reference to Real Presences.
[4] Interview with Christopher Tayler, Il postino | Books | The Guardian 19 April 2008, accessed 3 November 2021.
[5] Mark Krupnick, “Steiner’s Literary Journalism: ‘The Heart of the Maze’” in Nathan A. Scott, Jr and Ronald A. Sharp (eds), Reading George Steiner (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 48.
[6] Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London, Macmillan: 1996 edn), 127f.
[7] The sibling kinship between Islam and Judaism has often been noted, and Derrida seems here to contextualize his thinking within this rationalist paradigm where the Quran is based on the command by the Angel Gibril to Recite! what is written on a perfect tablet in heaven.
[8] Krupnick, 48.
[9] This phrase is universally and erroneously understood to mean the northern industrial cotton mills, and Blake’s target as capitalism – which indicates just how much the university has been captured by atheistic Marxism.
[10] Roger Lundin in The Culture of Interpretation: Christian faith and the Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, Mich. : W.B. Eerdmans, 1993) explains the force of American culture as “anti-culture”, since the US was formed by the early settlers kicking over the traces of regimes that had failed or oppressed them, and which they had left behind for good. Culture is bad. Unfortunately America has created a different culture – one that is at odds with, and indeed, envies and apes, everyone else’s.
[11]Facebook outage: What happened, who is to blame and will it happen again? (telegraph.co.uk) Accessed 7 October 2021.
[12] Marshall McLuhan, “The Logos Reaching Across Barriers”: Letters to Ong, Mole, Maritain, and Culkin” in Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds) The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion Toronto and New York: Stoddart), 60 and 209.
[13] “Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as a spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer” (ibid., 72).
[14] “I have seen scientists stare, as at lunacy, at the central deconstructive axiom that ‘there is nothing outside the text’.” The University Festival Lecture, given at the McEwan Hall, Edinburgh, 11 August 1996, (14).
[15] Marshall McLuhan, “The Logos Reaching Across Barriers”: Letters to Ong, Mole, Maritain, and Culkin” in Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds) The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion Toronto and New York: Stoddart), 71.
[16] For historian David d’Avray sermons were the earliest form of mass media, and while Latin was Europe’s lingua franca for hymns and liturgy, sermons were preached in the vernacular. See D’Avray, D. L.., Bériou, Nicole. Modern questions about medieval sermons : essays on marriage, death, history and sanctity. (Italy: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto medioevo, 1994), pp. 3-29.
[17] Marshall McLuhan, “Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin”in Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds) The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion Toronto and New York: Stoddart), 52.
[18] Clever “re-branding” of left and right thinking spear-headed by Anthony Giddens of the LSE, attempted – and failed long-term – to reinvest traditional political categories with new meaning e.g. socialism was to mean social justice henceforth, divested of its economic Marxist history, and funded by a one-off economic boom built by Thatcher. The ‘third way’ may have worked for New Labour, but it is impossible now | Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill | The Guardian Accessed 1 November 2021.
[19] Op cit.