ABSTRACT
One recalls George Steiner's Silenus sounding lament on the advantageousness of both suicide and renunciation of child-bearing. After all, in his lamentations over the century's "carnival of bestiality" and the enduring scars of the Shoah, Steiner argues that the Jews have only "committed the crime of being", although he does elsewhere claim that the Jew brings humanity face to face with an unflattering and threatening Other. It is the sensibility that fuels Steiner's appreciation of tragic drama since in the latter, read 'realistically' and 'mimetically', one encounters a tragic perspective on the nature being in the world. Unlike the rhetorical violence and hyperbole of Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-Christianity, however, Steiner's discussion appears to treat the tragic's relation to Christian hope from a literary perspective. For it is in the tragic sensibility that Steiner leaves his reader gasping for some form of hope – one that is not provided, and whose potential shape he explicitly denies to Christian theology.
