Grammars of Creation

Originating in the Gifford lectures for 1990 At the end of a century whose catastrophic violence has damaged irreparably the human capacity of hope, the advance of scientific knowledge has so deepended our knowledge of the origins of life that the creation in the laboratory of genetic material capable of self-reproduction is almost an accomplished fact. In this work, Steiner seeks to articulate our experience of the present condition: he explores the complex realtions between cration and invention in literature and science, music and mathematics; he explains how radically the electronic media are changing the ways in which we communicate and generate meaning; he demonstrates how the altered status of death enforces new understandings of the gratuitous miracle of creation.