Nostalgia for the Absolute
The Massey Lectures Series
The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.
This book comprises the 1974 Massey Lectures, “Nostalgia for the Absolute,” broadcast in November 1974 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Paul Buckley.
George Steiner
George Steiner is an internationally renowned writer and scholar. He was born in Paris and received his B.A. in 1948 from the University of Chicago. In 1950 he received his M.A. from Harvard University. From 1950 to 1952 he earned his Ph.D. where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He joined the staff of The Economist and later was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University.
Steiner was the Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva for twenty years, becoming Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 1994. He has since taught comparative literature at Oxford and was the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard from 2001-2002.
His numerous nonfiction works include Tolstoy or Dostoevskiy, The Death of Tragedy, Aspects of Language and Translation, Language and Silence, Real Presences, and Grammars of Creation. Steiner is also the author of works of fiction and poetry, including The Portage to San Cristobel, and Proofs and Three Parables. George Steiner lives in Cambridge and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE
NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE
GEORGE STEINER
Copyright © 1974 George Steiner
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First published in 1974 by CBC Enterprises
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Steiner, George, 1929–
Nostalgia for the Absolute
(CBC Massey lectures series)
Text of radio lectures broadcast in fall 1974.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-594-9
ISBN-I0: 0-88784-594-0
1. Christianity—20th century. 2. Civilization—Modern—1950—
3. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 4. Freud, Sigmund, 1836-1939. 5. Levi-Strauss Claude.
I. Title. II. Series
BR125.S73 1997 270.8'2 C97-93o636-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927971
Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Printed and bound in Canada
NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE
CONTENTS
The Secular Messiahs
Voyages into the Interior
The Lost Garden
The Little Green Men
Does the Truth Have a Future?
THE SECULAR MESSIAHS I
The conjecture which I want to put forward in these Massey Lectures is a very simple one.
Historians and sociologists agree, and after all we should sometimes believe them too, that there has been a marked decline in the role played by formal religious systems, by the churches, in Western society.
The origins and causes of this decline can be variously dated and argued, and, of course, they have been. Some would locate them in the rise of scientific rationalism during the Renaissance. Others would assign them to the scepticism, to the explicit secularism, of the Enlightenment with its ironies about superstition and all churches. Still others would maintain that it was Darwinism and modern technology during the industrial revolution which made systematic beliefs, systematic theology, and the ancient centrality of the churches so obsolete. But the phenomenon itself is agreed upon. Gradually, for these very complicated and diverse reasons, the Christian faiths (may I emphasize this plural) which had organized so much of the Western view of man’s identity and of our function in the world, whose practices and symbolism had so deeply pervaded our daily lives from the end of the Roman and Hellenistic world onward, lost their hold over sensibility and over daily existence. To a greater or lesser degree, the religious core of the individual and of the community degenerated into social convention. They became a kind of courtesy, an occasional or perfunctory set of reflexes. For the very great majority of thinking men and women—even where church attendance continued—the life-springs of theology, of a transcendent and systematic doctrinal conviction, had dried up.
This desiccation, this drying-up, affecting as it did the very centre of Western moral and intellectual being, left an immense emptiness. Where there is a vacuum, new energies and surrogates arise. Unless I read the evidence wrongly, the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts—mor or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent—to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology. This vacancy, this darkness in the middle, was one of “the death of God” (remember that Nietzsche’s ironic, tragic tonality in using that famous phrase is so often misunderstood). But I think we could put it more accurately: the decay of a comprehensive Christian doctrine had left in disorder, or had left blank, essential perceptions of social justice, of the meaning of human history, of the relations between mind and body, of the place of knowledge in our moral conduct.
It is to these issues, on whose formulation and resolution society and individual life depend for coherence, that the great “anti-theologies”, the “meta-religions” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, address themselves. These are very awkward terms and I apologize for them. “Metareligion”, “anti-theology”, “surrogate creed”—they are awkward but also useful tags. Let me try and pull them together in these five talks by using a general term. I want to propose to you the word “mythology”.
Now in order to qualify for the status of a mythology, in the sense in which I am going to try and define it, a social, a psychological, or a spiritual doctrine or body of thought must fulfil certain conditions. Let’s have a look at these. The body of thought must make a claim of totality. That sounds very simple-minded, and in a way it is. Let me try and sharpen the idea. What do we mean by its being total? It must affirm that the an
alysis which it puts forward of the human condition—of 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”.
This criterion of totality has a very important consequence. It allows, it invites, if the mythology is an honest and serious one, disproof or falsification. A total system, a total explanation, falls down when and where a substantive exception, a really powerful counter-example, can be produced. It is no use trying to patch up a little corner here or adding a bit of glue or string there. The construct collapses unless it is a whole. If any of the central mysteries, sacramental mysteries, of Christianity or of the life of Christ or his message were to be totally disproved, it would be no good trying to do a quick repair job on one corner of the structure.
Secondly, a mythology in the sense in which I am using the word, 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. Those of you who are interested in the Mormon movement will easily recognize my image: an angel appearing to the founder of the whole movement and handing to him the famous golden plates, or the Mosaic law. There will be an original group of disciples who are in immediate contact with the master, with the founder’s genius. 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 than 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.
The third criterion of a true mythology is the hardest to define, and I ask you to bear with me because I hope it will emerge by force of example in these five talks. 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. As we proceed, I hope this will become entirely clear.
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 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 antireligious, 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. In other words, when we consider Marxism, when we look at the Freudian or Jungian diagnoses of consciousness, when we look at the account of man offered by what is called structural anthropology, when we examine all these from the point of view of mythology, we shall see them as total, as canonically organized, as symbolic images of the meaning of man and of reality. And when we think about them we will recognize in them not only negations of traditional religion (because each of them is saying to us, look, we don’t need the old church any more—away with dogma, away with theology), but systems which at every decisive point show the marks of a theological past.
Allow me to underline this. It is really the centre of what I’m trying to say, and I hope it is quite clear. 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. And perhaps we would say that in any great struggle one begins to become like one’s opponent.
This is only one way, of course, of thinking of the great philosophic, political, anthropological movements which now dominate so much of our personal climate. The convinced Marxist, the practising psychoanalyst, the structural anthropologist, will be outraged at the thought that his beliefs, that his analyses of the human situation, are mythologies and allegoric constructs directly derivative from the religious world-image which he has sought to replace. He will be furious at that idea. And his rage has its justification.
I have neither the wish nor the competence to offer technical observations, for example, on the Marxist theory of surplus value, on the Freudian account of the libido or the id, on the intricate logistics of kinship and linguistic structure in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. All I hope to do is to draw your attention to certain powerful, recurrent features and gestures in all these “scientific” theories. I want to suggest to you that these features directly reflect the conditions left by the decline of religion and by a deepseated nostalgia for the absolute. That nostalgia—so profound, I think, in most of us—was directly provoked by the decline of Western man and society, of the ancient and magnificent architecture of religious certitude. Like never before, today at this point in the twentieth century, we hunger for myths, for total explanation: we are starving for guaranteed prophecy.
The mythological scenario in Marxism, which I am beginning with in this first talk, is not only expressly dramatic, but is also representative of the great current of thought and feeling in Europe which we call romanticism. Like other constructs of social utopia, of secular, messianic salvation, which follow on the French revolution, Marxism can be expressed in terms of historical epic. It tells of the progress of man from enslavement to the future realm of perfect justice. Like so much of romantic art, music, and literature, Marxism translates the theological doctrine of the fall of man, of original sin, and of ultimate redemption, into historical, social terms.
Marx himself suggests an identification of his own role with that of Prometheus. Isn’t it interesting, and in a way unsurprising, that when Marx was a young man the last thing he was planning to do was to write a major critique of political economy? Rather, he was working on an epic poem about Prometheus. And you can guess how the later scenario works. Bearing the destructive, but also cleansing, fire of truth, i.e., the materialist-dialectical understanding of the economic and social force of history, Prometheus/Marx will lead enslaved humanity to the new dawn of freedom. Man was once innocent, he was free of exploitation. Through what dark error, through what sombre felony did he fall from this state of grace?
This is the first of our theoretic problems and it is one of extreme difficulty. In each of the great mythologies or substitute religions we are looking at together, the nature of the original sin remains obscure or problematic. How did slavery arise? What are the origins of the class system? Marx’s answer remains peculiarly opaque. Perhaps I can explain why. Like almost every post-romantic, particularly German, he was obsessed with the magnificence of ancient Greece. He regarded the ancient Greek culture as the crown of man—artistically, philosophically, poetically, even in some ways politically. He knew full well about slavery and about the primitive development of Greek economy. So how could he reconcile his belief in the economic conditions of human well-being with what he knew of ancient Greek history? The answer is that he was too honest to lie about it and he never reconciled them. With one breath he speaks of the total excellence and eternal supremacy of ancient Greece, and with the next breath he tells us that the whole of human history is a great march forward into freedom and progress. We know from Marx that it is only with feudalism, and with the evolution of feudalism into mercantilism, and later, capitalism, that his epic diagnosis becomes confident. But the early writings, the famous 1844 manuscripts, show how explicitly theological was his image of the lost condition of man’s innocence. I want to quote here because unless one goes back to these profoundly moving pages it is difficult to believe that we are listening to Marx and not, for example, to Isaiah. He’s describing w
hat this kingdom of innocence, this garden of perfect justice was like: “Assume,” says Marx, “assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one. Then you can exchange love for love. Then you can exchange trust only for trust.” This is a fantastic vision of the proper stateof human society. And let us bear it in mind when we come back to questions of eros, of love, and of exchange between men, in later talks in this series. Instead, says Marx, man carries about on his very mind and body the lasting emblem of his fallen state. And what is that emblem? It is the fact that man is exchanging money instead of love for love and trust for trust. I quote again: “Money is the alienated ability—or perhaps I should translate genius or capacity—of mankind.” Money is the alienated “mankindedness” of man—a dreadful condemnation when we think of the earlier vision of true innocence.
Now this sense of a distant catastrophe, of a cosmic disgrace—and may I put a hyphen in the word, a dis-grace, a falling from grace—comes through to us with vivid terror in the Marxist vision, as it does in Coleridge, in the “Ancient Mariner”, or in Wagner’s “Ring”. Press more closely for definition, for historic location. Ask where did this horrible thing happen? What did we do wrong? Why have we been thrown out of the Garden of Eden? I don’t think you really get a good answer. No less than Rousseau, Blake, or Wordsworth, Marx adopts almost unconsciously the romantic axiom of a lost childhood of man. Turning to the wonders of the Greek poets whom he loved so much; turning, as we have seen, though perhaps unconsciously, to the language of the prophets, Marx speaks, and I quote again, of “the social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in complete beauty”. And when we ask again, with mounting impatience: What is the fall of man? What sin did we commit? Marxism does not really reply.
But there can be no doubt about the visionary messianic character of what it says about the future. If it does not answer our burning question about the original catastrophe, it is only too eager to tell us everything about the day after tomorrow, about the withering away of the state, and of mankind’s blessed existence in a world without class, without economic oppression, without poverty, and without war. It is in the name of this promise that generations of radical and revolutionary idealists have sacrificed their lives. It is to bring about this Edenic consummation–I do want to use the word Edenic because I think it’s the only right one—of man’s historical destiny, that untold suffering has been visited on dissenters, heretics, saboteurs. It is because even the most brutal totalitarianism could be construed as a necessary stage of transition between class conflict and utopia, that rational men and women were prepared to serve Stalinism.