When George Steiner was eight years old, in 1937, his father tricked him into reading part of The Iliad in the original Greek. The translated version, he said, left out the best parts.

Steiner's father was a lawyer, not a scholar. But in that rich cultural brew that was inter-war Jewish Europe, it was not impossible that a lawyer and his young child might together sound out the 25-century-old syllables of Homer's epic poem.

"I owe my life to that," says Steiner, today a courtly 73-year-old scholar of world renown. He means "life" in the sense of the life he has led (he also literally owes his life to his father, who sent him from Paris to the United States shortly afterwards when Jews could still escape). "But," he adds, thinking again of the life of culture he has known, "I have no illusions that others will live like that."

Last Saturday, Steiner came to York University in Toronto to share top billing with Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia and Jean Baudrillard at a conference called Living Literacies. While several of the less-famous participants labour in the stony field of actually teaching reading and writing -- some eight-million Canadians are subliterate -- others, like Steiner, have speculated about the death of a higher literacy. To wit, millions can read computer manuals, but very, very few people today have either the wish or the will to read The Iliad.

Every generation loses a little bit of the past, as new poems and novels jostle for attention. But Steiner (like Baudrillard, Sontag and Paglia) believes that the catastrophic forgetfulness that has overtaken the West since the Second World War is a sign that the print culture that sustained us for six centuries is actually dying.

"The things that have been at the core of my life will be found only in museums, which saddens me. I think of the Coolidge Room at the Smithsonian Institute. It contains 20 silent Stradivari. It's the saddest room I know."

This feeling also motivates the surpassingly eloquent pessimism to be found in his books ("grammars of nihilism flicker on the horizon," he writes in his latest book, Grammars of Creation). But in person -- and this comes as a surprise -- he is brimful of optimism and curiosity. He has convinced himself that nihilism is not inevitable, if only because it would be tedious in a way we are not wired to tolerate. Something will take the place of the culture that is passing away. "I won't live to see what it will be, but it might be splendid."

What it will not be, he is certain, is transcendent. Many thinkers have observed that literal belief in God, or any reality behind the reality we see, is rapidly disappearing wherever modern values and technology penetrate. Steiner is one of the first seriously to ask what that may do to the human imagination.

He casts the net wide. It's not only that almost everything of beauty in our culture was made by people who believed in and hoped for life after death. It's also that our great political and social thinkers believed likewise. For Steiner, in his tongue-in-cheek mode, idealistic Marxism is nothing more than a "heresy" of Judaism.

"Certain kinds of Western creation are underwritten by the possible existence of God," he says. "When that question becomes embarrassing exhibitionism among educated people, as it has, then there are orders of [artistic] work that we will not be getting again in the West."

The triumph of disbelief has brought in its wake the kind of art critics who mock the idea of beauty and the kind of literary critics who can't admit that a work of imagination is superior to the critics who comment on it. Steiner is the sworn enemy of all such. For him, deconstructionism and postmodernism are variants of the nihilism he loathes, and a philosopher like Jacques Derrida is little more than a foot soldier in the operation of "mopping up" what's left of Western spiritual values. "But you know," says Steiner, with that spreading, wicked smile that beguiles friend and enemy alike, "he's gotten very spiritual recently. I call him the rabbi nowadays."

Apart from intense immersion in high culture, the other determining event of Steiner's life was the destruction of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. In 1974, when he came to Toronto to give CBC's Massey Lectures, he argued that the Holocaust had destroyed Europe's belief in itself, and that the continent would never recover its cultural confidence.

These words distressed me at the age of 25, and for years afterward, I thought often of George Steiner, but avoided reading him.

During that time, he continued to develop these ideas, asking himself above all why racism against the Jewish people had been pursued with such ferocity as to make it appear different in kind from other racisms. His eventual conclusion was that Judaism had, more than once, set out dreadfully intimidating challenges that humanity had not asked for and could not meet. First, it struck down the comforting familiarity of a pagan world with its riverine gods and forest deities, replacing them with an invisible and remote single God. Then, with the ministry of Christ, came the further injunction to turn the other cheek to one's enemies and even, absurdly, to love them. Finally came Karl Marx, with his rabbinical injunction to abjure wealth and with it the comforts of status and hierarchy.

In his near-autobiography, Errata, Steiner recalls the unmitigated shock and horror that washed over him when news of the concentration camps emerged after the war (learning that he is 20 years older than I, born just after the war, he replies: "I am far more than 20 years older than anyone who did not see the war"). With time, though, he came to see the Holocaust as part of a general slaughter that made the last century the most bloody-handed in history.

"We're in a time of transition now. Things are awful in Europe today," he observes thoughtfully, without being any more specific than that. "But when I wake up in the morning, I'm amazed that after the death of 150-million people, there is anything there at all! Europe's life is energetic. How did it get up out of the ashes?" This is not, as it might be from somebody else, a simple hip-hooray for the indomitable human spirit. "On the contrary, sometimes thinking about this makes me feel morally sad. Perhaps Europe should not have recovered. But we're cats, aren't we? We leap from the burning roof."

In spite of his lifelong defence of Judaism, and memorializing of its dead, Steiner in recent years has become a potent critic of the state of Israel. He especially abhors the theft of Palestinian lands through appeals to Jewish mystical nationalism. He has even gone so far as to draw the frightful parallel with German mystical nationalism, and in his novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., he puts these statements in the mouth of Adolf Hitler himself. Where, says Hitler to the Jewish commandos who have hunted him down in an Amazon swamp, do they think he got the idea of a Chosen People?

Surely this has put him at odds with his own people. "Ha!" he cries, noting that when the novel was turned into a play, there were hundreds of demonstrators outside the theatre. I am on the point of asking why he did something so certain to drive a wedge between him and his community, but the question dies on my lips. It would be impertinent, like saying: So, why didn't you just remain silent?

At this point, we are sitting in the coffee room with Jean Baudrillard, who is about to deliver his own speech. Baudrillard is one of those postmodern philosophers Steiner has so often attacked, and they are having a jolly, friendly conversation in French. The subject of optimism arises.

"That reminds me of a joke about the Pope, a minister and a rabbi," says Steiner, improbably. "It's the day when God says, 'I've got another flood coming and this time I'm not putzing around. You're all going down in 10 days.' So the Pope assembles the flock and says, 'Go to confession, trust to the mercy of Jesus Christ.' The minister says, 'Pay off your debts, sell your shares, turn over the money you cheated on your taxes, get your affairs in order.' The rabbi thinks for a moment, and says to the congregation: 'Well, 10 days. That should be enough time to learn to breathe underwater.' "