Religion: GEORGE SANTAYANA: 1863-1952

In his room last week at a hospital run by the Blue Sisters in Rome, George Santayana died in his sleep. He was 88, and had lived to become one of the great names of the century. His last illness was brief. Though he had lived among the nuns for eleven years, with characteristic ambiguity Santayana never officially returned to the Roman Catholic Church in which he was baptized; he did not receive the Sacraments on his deathbed. His body was taken to a chapel in Rome’s Catholic Verano Cemetery, and left there without ceremony until it is decided where and how he will be buried.

GEORGE SANTAYANA was one of the three immensely old wise men of the West, though his influence in philosophy and affairs could not be compared to that of his fellows and contemporaries, Benedetto Croce or Bertrand Russell. He never played their part in public life: as a man and a philosopher he was one of nature’s exiles. Taken by his Spanish father at the age of eight from the mournful and austere town of Avila in Spain and set down among American relations in the intellectual Boston of 1872. Santayana became an American by his education at Harvard, but retained a strong yet not orthodox Spanish cast of mind. His family had been rationalists in a fiercely Catholic country; he reacted by leaning towards the esthetic side of Catholicism, and, at the same time, was skeptical about the faith. He was a man distracted between two spiritual homes. Latin hedonism disputed with American puritanism in him, Spanish asceticism and pessimism with American optimism; he took up the part of the detached, aristocratic spectator in philosophy and life. He settled for some years into a brilliant reign as a dissenting and discursive professor of philosophy at Harvard, but after 1912 he migrated once more, this time to France and Spain, then England and finally Italy, where, internationally famous, he was venerated as a melodious hermit and a beguiling sage.

If his upbringing had forced upon Santayana the mind of the wandering student, it had also made him a solitary. As a boy he played no games, and in all his life he never used a typewriter, or drove an automobile, or danced. He never married. An esthete and a skeptic, a materialist and a poet, a hedonist but of few pleasures, Santayana’s mind might have been paralyzed by its conflicts had he not built for himself a sort of monastery of beautiful prose, which was greatly admired by the literary if it was sometimes suspected by philosophers. Santayana’s first work had been a volume of sonnets, and poetic intuition was at the bottom of his first important work, The Life of Reason. This appeared explicitly when he modified it by Realms of Being, where knowledge is held to be “faith in the unknowable,” and where he expounded the mysterious and accommodating “theory of essences” for which he became noted.

THERE was really nothing mysterious about Santayana’s line: he was a psychologist rather than a philosopher. Like the early Greeks, he was a strict materialist who used philosophy to organize the world in a practical way. He had the profound Spanish belief in the vital part to be played by custom. What he aimed at was the discovery of a civilized and permissible attitude toward life. So he saw religion as a useful myth, not because it makes men moral, but because it civilizes them. He enjoyed mocking American. English and German Protestants for their rigid dismissal of superstition and their concern with questions of conduct. The doctrine of eternal damnation (he wrote) did not mean that man must behave himself lest he suffer torment in the afterlife, but was a poetically enlightening image which refined men’s sensibility and hardened their stoicism before the intolerable truth that all human acts, all evils and all pain, are irremediable. What is done is done, and man must take the consequences with open eyes. Between Spanish stoicism and New England puritanism there was obviously a grim link, but behind Santayana’s philosophy lies another traditional Spanish theme: that life is a dream.

To a younger generation of philosophers, Santayana did not appear to be dealing with philosophical questions, and indeed there are no Spanish philosophers and never have been. But there have been a number of distinguished essayists, unsystematic, highly individual intermediaries between personal agony and philosophy: writers like Unamuno and, later, Ortega y Gasset. To this group of brilliant egoists Santayana really belongs. His real excellence lay in literature. He was a good minor poet of the severe kind, and understood, quite well, that he had been torn away in childhood from the sources of passion which feed great poetry. He was an admired literary critic and, indeed, has been compared, because of their common elegance, with Matthew Arnold.

As a novelist, Santayana did not succeed. The Last Puritan was a very starchy, sententious book. He was unable to see people except in relation to himself or his ideas. In his volumes of autobiography, Persons and Places, on the other hand, which describe the spiritual history of his wandering, split-up family, the life in Avila at the turn of the century where sorrow, rigid custom and a melancholy religion absolutely ruled the population, and the strange contrasts offered by the earnest Boston of William James and the raffish England of Lord John Russell—in things like these Santayana is a master.

The prose has lost its lushness and artifice> Spanish precision and plainness have come through. Detail, passivity, indifference, a stoical acceptance of life, patience, an ironical resignation to the peculiar ways of human beings are its Spanish traits. Santayana’s psychological powers are hardly less illuminating in his long essays on the Anglo-Saxon and the American characters; he had already lit up the follies of the German mind in his work on Egotism in German Philosophy, a work much consulted during the war against Hitler.

He once wrote of himself: “The only remarkable thing about my career is that I should have spent the better part of my life in the United States, and written my books in the English language, while retaining my Spanish nationality and sentiment, and figuring in the English-speaking world as a sort of permanent guest, familiar, appreciative, and I hope discreet, but still foreign. This is no less true of me intellectually than it is socially, and should not be ignored in considering my work.”

Of Santayana’s sprawling political work, Dominations and Powers, which he published in his old age, it can only be said that all readers seem to have been lost in its noble but confusing labyrinth. The old Spanish-Catholic belief in mystical authority came out in it; nothing could be less congenial to Western thought. Subjective philosophy, intuition, essence, had so thoroughly “gone out” that, while the sweep of Santayana’s mind was admired, he seemed to be saying nothing seizable. His true role lay in being a civilized hermit on the adjacent hill, the sage apart, the skeptical psychologist. Loneliness and ecstasy were the distinctly nonmodern desires he recommended to Boston and the world.