Tuesday 4 February 2020

George Steiner (1929-2020), RIP

I am surprised and saddened by the death of holocaust survivor and brilliant literary and cultural critic, George Steiner, yesterday.  It was from him that I learned to see the religious nature of anti or post-Christian secularism and other post-Christian isms.

Steiner taught me that modern atheistic secularism is not merely the lack of religion but a new, replacement religion, a "meta-religion", and "anti-theology", a "surrogate-creed" (Nostalgia for the Absolute, 2).  He taught me that modern atheistic/anti-Christian secularism is a competing mythology with its own social, psychological, and spiritual "doctrine or body of thought" which fulfills three necessary conditions of mythology, just as Christian or Jewish theology and faith does (Nostalgia, 2-3).

First, the modern mythology of secularism makes a "claim of totality"; it affirms "that the analysis which it puts forward of the human condition - our history, of the meaning of your life and mine, of our further expectations - is a total analysis.  A mythology, in this sense, is a complete picture of 'man in the world'."  Secondly, a mythology "will have certain very easily recognizable forms of beginning and development.  There will have been a moment of crucial revelation or diagnostic insight from which the entire system springs.  This moment and the history of the founding prophetic vision will be preserved in a series of canonic texts" (Nostalgia, 3).  Third, "a true mythology will develop its own language, its own characteristic idiom, its own set of emblematic images, flags, metaphors, dramatic scenarios.  It will breed its own body of myths.  It pictures the world in terms of certain cardinal gestures, rituals, and symbols" (Nostalgia, 3).

Steiner classes Marxism, Freudian or Jungian "diagnoses of consciousness", the "account of man offered by what is called structural anthropology", as mythologies in this sense (Nostalgia, 4).  To those we might add any number of other ideologies or meta-narratives - ways of viewing reality that seek to explain the way things are in support of the tightly held beliefs of the group.  We might call them world-views also, but 'mythology' as Steiner uses it gets beyond the merely rational which might be associated by some with the term world-view, to note the deeply religious nature of such all-encompassing movements.  Its not hard to see many more current mythologies which qualify as anti-theologies or meta-religions.  C.S. Lewis's critique of modern anti-theistic scientism also fits this model, for it is the absolute faith in modern science, belief that science eventually will solve all human problems, the dogma that science doesn't just uncover facts and explain the way things work but imparts truth, meaning and purpose.

Steiner also brilliantly noted that, while these replacement post-Christian surrogate-creeds would chastise Christianity for imposing its pervasive and all-encompassing doctrines and life style upon all those under its sway, they seek to do the very same thing.  And though they might be born and grow in reaction against Christianity (or other old faiths), they quickly develop their own standards of orthodoxy and their own version of the Inquisition to punish those of their own numbers who do not keep the faith delivered once for all (think of the successive waves of radical Feminism, or the morphing gender movements that break with and attack each other, or the splintering within political perspectives and parties that frequently fight their closest neighbours more passionately than their opposite ideology - like the splintering of the right-wing in the US.  Traitors and betrayers are worse than mere unbelievers.  Speaking of these modern anti-Christian mythologies, Steiner says
Soon some of these disciples will break away into heresy.  They will produce rival mythologies or submythologies.  And now watch something very important.  The orthodox in the great movement will hate such heretics, will pursue them with an enmity more violent then that which they vent on the unbeliever.  It's not the unbeliever they're afraid of - it's the heretic from within their own movement (Nostalgia, 2-3). 
I will let Steiner speak further:
Now consider these attributes: totality, by which I simply mean the claim to explain everything; canonic texts delivered by the founding genius; orthodoxy against heresy; crucial metaphors, gestures, and symbols.  Surely the point I am making is already obvious to you.  The major mythologies constructed in the West since the the early nineteenth century are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma.  They are themselves a kind of substitute theology.  They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely anti-religious, which may postulate a world without God and may deny an afterlife, but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect (4).
Those great movements, those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace (5).
Steiner examines Marxism, as a test case, in light of his thesis, and notes that it meets the criteria at every point.  After all, it wasn't capitalists who killed Trotsky.  Speaking of the eventual failure of Marxism, "if failure indeed it be", Steiner perceptively notes:
What was at stake was no mere technical critique of certain economic institutions; it is not over theoretical questions of investment, division of labour, or trade cycles, that generations of men and women fought, died, and killed others.  The vision, the promise, the summons to total dedication and a renewal of man, were, in the full sense, messianic, religious, theological (11). 
This perceptive brilliance comes from just the opening chapter in a little book which was originally the 1974 Massey Lectures.  The whole book is gold.  Steiner's cultural and societal critiques are typically overarching and broad rather than narrow and detailed, which is why they are so applicable and ring so true, for they are critiques of broad movements and the critiques make sense of the overarching way such movements work and think.  I this, Steiner resonates with the spirit of Lewis's statement of why he embraced the Christian faith:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
This is what all 'mythologies' (in Steiner's sense) are trying to do: make us see everything through their lens.  And that is because, no matter what objections people might have to the Christian faith's portrayal of reality, when you remove it you don't succeed in removing the human need to inhabit a narrative and a universe with inherent meaning.

I am grateful to Kevin Vanhoozer, who ten years ago first put me on to George Steiner's work, Real Presences, and who references Steiner many times in two of his works in particular, Is There a Meaning in this Text? and First Theology.   Steiner's insight and wisdom will be missed.


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