Part 2: The Broken Contract

Think about the last time a word let you down. A promise that meant nothing, an advertisement that claimed far more than its product, a headline that said one thing while the story said another. Part 2 of Real Presences is about a much bigger version of that let-down.

Steiner argues that since the late nineteenth century the trust that language corresponds to the world has been broken. He sees this culminating in deconstruction, where words point only to other words and never finally to anything beyond them. He ties this to a wider retreat from the word. Science and technology move into number and byte, a realm beyond ordinary verbal expression. He also describes modern critical theory as stories about formal experience that imitate science with claims to abstract universality. And here is a striking detail: Steiner concedes that deconstruction, judged by its own logic, strikes him as unanswerable, yet he calls it untrue to lived experience. In other words, he feels the argument's force and still cannot live as if it were true.

That tension is worth sitting with. Steiner writes as a critic, and his answer is an argument about meaning, not a confession of faith. So let Scripture speak for itself. John 1:1-5 opens with a confidence that sounds like the opposite of a broken contract: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Word is not a floating label. The Word is with God, and the Word is God. Whatever else language does, John says its deepest root is a person.

Then John says the Word is tied to the world: "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made." The world is not silent stuff waiting for us to attach labels. It was made through the Word. That is a very different starting point from words pointing only to words.

Verse 4 adds, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." Meaning is not just a puzzle. It is light. And verse 5 admits the darkness is real: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John does not pretend that confusion, lies and emptiness do not exist. He claims they do not win.

This is where we test Steiner against Scripture. He identifies a real wound: words that have lost their grip on reality. John goes further and names who holds words and world together. Not every reader of Steiner will follow him to John, and the book does not claim to. But as you read Part 2, notice where your own trust in words has been strained, and where you have been tempted to treat words as just noise.