George Santayana’s Philosophy of Religion: His Roman Catholic Influences and Phenomenology by Edward W. Lovely (review)

This is an excellent book on Santayana. It establishes Lovely as a Santayana scholar, ranking him with the likes of Lachs, Levinson, and Woodward. He has a thorough command of both the primary sources and secondary literature.

Since many American naturalists writing on religion have either a liberal Protestant or a liberal Jewish background, Santayana’s Roman Catholic background provides a needed balance. Santayana, like many great American philosophers, helps point the way to a truly postmodern appreciation of religion.

The first chapter considers Santayana’s paradoxical relationship to Catholicism. His outlook was nontheistic yet included a Catholic cultural sensibility, theological fluency, and an appreciation of all religious attitudes, except Protestantism, as long as they did not inhibit human flourishing. He viewed orthodoxy as valuable in that it furnished a systematic structure for thought, provided it did not assert its own absolute truth or deny equal validity to other structures, such as Indian or Greek philosophy.

Lovely points out that for Santayana, religious doctrines are products of the human imagination. Although they are not based on fact, they are not arbitrary. Error comes from the hypostatization of the ideals symbolized in doctrine. Even “the most severe of religious doctrines (e.g., the doctrine of hell) have profound meaning and value.” However, a “religion or philosophy obsessed with . . . its own formulated dogma, and imposing its will in a way that distracted from a person’s individual response to the world was anathema” (21).

Lovely notes a parallel to St. Ignatius in the following description of spiritual discipline in Platonism and the Spiritual Life: “Spirituality has . . . special conditions such as concentration of thought, indifference to fortune and reputation, warmth of temperament disciplined into chastity and renunciation” (24).

Protestantism is the major exception to Santayana’s appreciation of diverse religious orientations. It fractured the spiritual and moral life of Western civilization and, along with the Renaissance and the French Revolution, left the public mind without a vestige of discipline.

In chapter 2 Lovely confronts the issue of whether there is continuity in Santayana’s thought. His view is that Santayana’s skepticism combined with animal faith is constant throughout his career, although there is “a maturation, that may be attributable to a more spiritual emphasis later in his life rather than an actual modification of his naturalism” (38–39). This chapter compares Santayana with Heraclitus, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer and concludes with a summary of the metaphysical aspects of Santayana’s materialistic vision that bear upon his philosophy of religion.

Chapter 3 makes the case that Santayana employs a phenomenological method in his preliminary skepticism and intuition of essences. Despite his materialism, Santayana brackets the question of the reality of religious doctrines in order to explore their symbolic power. Here the author compares Santayana with Husserl and also Heidegger, Whitehead, Peirce, and James.

Chapter 4 depicts Santayana’s philosophy of religion. Religion offers an escape from the mundane and opens another world to live in. Piety involves gratitude for the sources of our life, spirituality withdrawal from the pressures of the world in aspiration toward our ideals and contemplation of the eternal, while charity legitimizes the needs and ideals of others and sees the relativity of our own.

For Santayana, salvation is found in acceptance and contemplation. The spiritual life involves an intensified attention to essences. It parallels the Christian tradition of worldly detachment dedicated to a union with divinity. The spectator attitude here is far from the close connection between morality and religion in Dewey’s A Common Faith, although not so far from Dewey’s sense of the whole. I am surprised that the writer did not explore this complex relationship to Dewey.

Although prayer is addressed to no one, prayer is how we may be united in spirit with the ideal that may never be a reality and at the same...