This piece, by Scott McLemee, seems to me by far the best one I've seen on Steiner. Like the author, I found him at first fascinating, and then a bit more tiresome. I think he was the way I encountered an entire world of Central European thinking, kind of dark continental thought, the citizense of an imaginary empire stretching from Paris to Budapest, and from the Baltic south to Trieste. Steiner was by and large my first textual acquaintance who had first-personal knowledge of these writers, or at least the first one for whom their presence in his thought was part of what he talked about. Call it a higher name-dropping. 

Also, when I had begun the journey oneself of reading the thinkers he mentioned, I found that those thinkers led to others, and then to others, and on and on--that there was no end to the geniuses out there, and that the questions kept being returned to and then refined and asked again and then returned to again. But Steiner never did that. He was content with his texts, from the earliest piece of his that I read to the latest: it's as if his education had pretty much stopped by the time he began to type. McLemee is right about this as well:

Over time, what felt more and more bothersome about this was less the vanity than the insularity -- the Euro-narcissism. The problem was not that he rejected the possibility that classic Chinese poetry or treatises by Buddhist logicians might “assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness.” It just never comes up.

That seems right; there are definite borders to his thinking. It's odd to me, how crisply his bibliography is defined. Beyond it, there lies monsters. It reminds me of that old line of Beckett's, I think it is in Endgame: "Ah, the old questions. <Pause> The old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!"

Still, for all that, he was a formidably educated person, equipped with certain rare kinds of insight, and most definitely the kind of obsessive gene that is part of what makes for intellectual greatness. I am very grateful for all his writing, and I will remember his books, and keep them on my shelves, and take them off from time to time. His tribe is not without honor, and their work will remain well worth rereading, and reconsidering.