Two Suppers:
In three original, provocative lectures, writer and critic George Steiner explores the breaking of bread and the nature of love, as it is portrayed in the story of the Last Supper - in the Gospel of St. John - and in Plato's Symposium.
Agathon's Banquet:
George Steiner says that, in Plato's account, the dinner party serves to accentuate the distance between Socrates and his friends, between the philosophy of love he tells them about and their own competing, personal rivalries. He compares Jesus and Socrates.
That Night Before Passover:
In the Gospel According to St. John, the Last Supper does not occur on Passover, but before it. George Steiner explores themes of love, betrayal, the sacrificial lamb, and the scapegoat in history.
Sound file: From the second lecture, George Steiner on love as presented in two cities and two texts.
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Sound file: From the third lecture, George Steiner on the Last Supper... he draws a disturbing conclusion.
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The lectures were established to honour the memory of F.E.L. Priestley, a professor in the English Department of University College, at the University of Toronto, from 1944 until his retirement in 1970. They are intended to reflect the wide-ranging interests of the man after whom they're named, and so they're called lectures in the history of ideas.
As for the lecturer - perhaps no title describes George Steiner better than the one given him by Churchill College, Cambridge -- that of "Extraordinary Fellow". He's been a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. In 1994, he became the first Lord Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford. He's well-known for his reviews and opinion pieces in the New Yorker magazine - as a writer of fiction, including the novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., which is a search for Adolph Hitler in the jungles of South America. He's written many books of essays, among them, No Passion Spent, in which these F.E.L. Priestley Lectures appear.
The Greek playwright, Agathon, has won first prize in tragedy games held in Athens. He throws a banquet to celebrate, and invites his friends -- the great writer of comedy, Aristophanes, the aristocrat, politician, general all rolled into one - Alcibiades, and of course Socrates himself, among others. There's plenty of food and wine; there's even entertainment from a flute-player. But it all takes place in the past. Plato has a man named Apollodorus tell someone named Glaucon about the banquet some time after it's occurred. As you'll hear, the time-scheme's significant, with regard both to the banquet itself and the real people who attended it. Plato constructs a kind of drama around reported speech, based on memory.
Here in University College, at the University of Toronto, with the second of the F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures -- is George Steiner.
Other works of criticism by George Steiner: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, The Death of Tragedy, Language and Silence, In Bluebeard's Castle, Real Presences.