Lessons of the Masters

“Trenchant and moving.”―Robert Boyers, Los Angeles Times

The inexhaustible man of letters directs his critical gaze at his own profession―teaching.

When we talk about education today, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of “mastery,” with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests George Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in the most profound sorts of pedagogy. Based on Steiner's 2001–2002 Norton Lectures on the art and lore of teaching, Lessons of the Masters evokes a host of exemplary figures, including Socrates and Plato, Virgil and Dante, Heloise and Abelard, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, along with spiritual leaders from Buddhist and Confucian sages to Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov.

Pivotal in the unfolding of Western culture are Socrates and Jesus, charismatic masters who left no written teachings and founded no schools. In the efforts of their disciples―and in the passion narratives inspired by their deaths―Steiner sees the beginnings of the inward vocabulary, the encoded recognitions of much of our moral, philosophical, and theological idiom. He goes on to consider a diverse array of traditions and disciplines, returning throughout to three underlying themes: the master's power to exploit his student's dependence and vulnerability; the complementary threat of subversion and betrayal of the mentor by his pupil; and the reciprocal exchange of trust and love, of learning and instruction between master and disciple.

Forcefully written and passionately argued, Lessons of the Masters is itself a masterly testament to the high vocation and perilous risks undertaken by true teacher and learner alike.