A Book Review . . . Religion Interpreted From A Purely Naturalistic Viewpoint
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Santayana, George. The Life of Reason: Reason in Religion. Vol. VII, The Works of George Santayana, ed. M.S. Wokeck and M.A. Coleman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. Pp. lvii + 337.
After a valuable introduction by James Gouinlock, chapter I of Santayana’s treatise opens with the intriguing title, “How Religion May Be the Embodiment of Reason.” Whether one adheres to a religion or not, holds that there is a God or not, Santayana’s analysis of religion is of considerable merit for the insight it provides.
As those nations which were once thought of as comprising “Christendom” seem to be losing contact with the religious outlook that until the late 19th century defined their common culture, Santayana’s interpretation of religion and its role in society is surprisingly pertinent.
Santayana’s interpretation is just that, an interpretation from a purely naturalistic point of view. He doesn’t pretend to demonstrate his conclusions or even document them by way of footnotes. If you accept his premises that there is no evidence for the existence of God or for an immaterial order, one is led to his conclusion that “religion is an entirely human and political as was that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks.”
Santayana finds the origin of religion in pagan superstition. Fear, he believes, created the gods of classical antiquity, but human need also contributed. Religious practice, he finds, precedes theory in primitive religion. Prayer, ritual arts, and offering of thanksgiving preceded the theology which was created to justify them. Prayer, he holds, was not utilitarian in essence; to the contrary, its real essence consists in defining or clarifying the ideal and by fostering spiritual life, conceived as a perfecting exercise. Thus to be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal, and thereby escape utter worldliness. So construed, discipline and contemplation are their own reward.
Discussion of Vedic, Hebraic, and Christian myths follow. A chapter is entitled and devoted to what he calls “pagan, custom and barbaric genius infused into Christianity.” Exploring the difference between Christianity and Judaism, he believes, “Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect had it not been at once speculative, universal, and ideal by the infusion of Greek thought, and at the same time plastic and devotional by the adoption of pagan habits.” He even finds antecedents of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation in pagan religious sentiment.
“In the third century,” he writes, “Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious sense, closely akin.” Christianity insinuated itself almost unobserved into a society full of rooted traditions. “There were, we may say, two things in Apostolic teaching which rendered it capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish morality and mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ’s parables and maxims….The other point of contact which early Christianity had with the public need was the theme it offered to contemplation, the philosophy of history which it introduced to the western world.”
After Christ, history became a chronicle of the tension between two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, between two moralities, one natural and the other supernatural, between two philosophies, one rational, one revealed.
Although Santayana writes about religion in general, his focus is Christianity, specifically Catholicism. That being the case, he is necessarily led to a discussion of “Christian charity,” where he has some interesting things to say.
“Christian charity has two chief parts: first it hastens to relieve the body; then forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds to redeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform with so much tact and devotion are not such that philanthropy alone would inspire. . . . Charity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then to wean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianity covers the world with hospitals and orphanages, but its only positive labors go on in churches and convents. . . . Christians have sometimes interpreted charity as zeal to bring men into the fold; at other times when enthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpreted charity to be mere blind cooperation, no matter in what.”
In discussing human immortality, he is in accord with the ancients and even Aquinas, “Disembodied existence of the human soul is beyond demonstration.” As to belief in a future life he makes the point: “Ideal immortality is a principle revealed to insight; it is seen by observing the eternal quality of ideas and validities and the affinity to them native to reason and the cognitive energy of the mind. A future life, on the contrary, is a matter of faith or presumption.”
In a summing up, Santayana identifies two marks of religion, piety and spirituality. “Religion has two phases: Piety drinks at the deep, elemental sources of power and order: It studies nature, honors the past, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the strength thus acquired, remodeling all that it receives, and looking to the future and the ideal.”
Santayana wrote Reason in Religion at midlife when he was 42 years old. He was to live another 46 years. It is unlikely that greater experience and time for reflection could have changed his outlook, given his basic commitment.
Although he is sometimes thought of as a cultural Catholic, Santayana remained a philosophical atheist to the end. Whether one assumes his starting point or not, one can profitably read him for the acuteness of his observations and for the poetic quality in which he expresses them. Yet even upon a sympathetic reading, one waits in vain for proof or engagement with alternative viewpoints.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)
