Ultimate Religion

George Santayana's address, "Ultimate Religion," delivered at the Domus Spinozana (The Hague) during a conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of Spinoza's birth has been something of a touchstone for me since I first read it around 1980.

He begins with a question: "What inmost allegiance, what ultimate religion, would be proper to a wholly free and disillusioned spirit?" To be "wholly free and disillusioned" seemed to me then, and continues to seem now, a goal worthy of aspiration. What I did not know then but have since come to know is that freedom and disillusionment require constant vigilance and struggle. They are also two sides of the same coin--you cannot have one without the other. Consequently, though it is fashionable for many people (especially in the United States) to boast of their freedom while clinging tightly to their illusions, one can conclude only that they are self-deluded.

Santayana understood this fact about his adopted country only too well. It is interesting to note that he did not deliver his address in the United States, but in Europe; and not only in Europe, but in the one place in Europe where Benedict de Spinoza was able to secure sanctuary from his enemies. Europeans are no less subject to delusional thinking than are Americans.

After posing his initial query, Santayana invited his audience to "challenge [their] own assumptions and come to spiritual self-knowledge" by abstaining "from all easy faith." The pay-off of this procedure would be to achieve a state of mind utterly "denuded" of wishful thinking about the universe and the place of the human being within it. His goal was to elicit "the sincere confessions of a mind that has surrendered every doubtful claim and every questionable assurance." For Santayana, first and foremost among these doubtful claims is the belief that "though [an individual may be] living, [she] is powerless to live; and though [she] may die, [she] is powerless" to do so. Indeed, says Santayana, "the most important and radical of religious perceptions" is that "at every instant and in every particular," every person finds him or herself "in the hands of some alien and inscrutable power."

Is this "inscrutable power" God? Santayana argues that any such inference would require not only a logical leap but also "many qualifications." Instead of making that leap and conjecturing, he professes agnosticism. He will only say that this power is (and here he coins a word) "omnificent": it is, "by definition, the doer of everything that is done." Moreover, he does not assert "the physical validity" of his "sense of agency or cause"; instead, he is reporting a feeling, an impression--that of "the force, the friendliness, the hostility, the unfathomableness of the world."

It is not a "physical validity" of force that he feels, but a moral one: "... the moral presence of power comes upon a man in the night, in the desert, when he finds himself, as the Arabs say, alone with Allah."

Those familiar with the Qur'an cannot help but be reminded of Q. 8:17, where the Divine voice speaks to the Prophet regarding (later Muslim tradition holds) the Battle of Badr: before the fight, the Prophet is said to have tossed a handful of sand in the direction of his Meccan adversaries as a symbol of their impending defeat; God says, "...when you threw it was not your throw but God's" [cp. also Phil. 2: 12-13].

What can this possibly mean? Santayana offers: "...omnificent power flows in part through our persons; the spirit itself is a spark of that fire, or rather the light of that flame..."

On its face, this sounds bizarre; yet it is no more so than Dylan Thomas's famous lines:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Santayana felt the "force" of which the poet spoke. Interestingly, without ignoring the ominous (and, in Santayana's view, ultimately tragic) aspects of that force, he "chose" to submit to it (i.e., he accepted his fate as a mortal being). In so doing, he discovered that, by forgoing self-delusion and submitting to his tragic fate, he, qua mortal human being, was rendered capable of charity.

This somewhat surprising conclusion followed from his recognition that the fate to which he had surrendered himself is, in fact, common to all; both the manifestation of "omnificence" in a particular life and its eventual and inevitable withdrawal is a shared experience. Like it or not, we are all in this together. We can choose to be bitter about it, but what (Santayana wondered) would be the point of that? Bitterness would change nothing. Why not make the best of a bad situation and be charitable?

Santayana termed "health" the emotional and moral adjustment that every individual must learn to make regarding the stark and unforgiving facts of the human condition when that adjustment results in a charitable disposition towards the whole.

Moreover, he argued that when we learn to love for others what we love for ourselves (for Santayana, following Spinoza, the perfection of our existence--a life lived to the fullest), we attain a vision of "the good."

Far from being wholly disinterested, Santayana (who appears to have read Freud) regarded this love of (and for the "good" of) others erotic--it is "really love and not something wingless called by that name."

And he recognized that there are a great many complications involved with envisioning "the good" in this Spinozistic manner; he did not engage in any sort of moral casuistry on its behalf (i.e., he did not pause to work through the details). He acknowledged both the faith and the idealism required to organize one's life in light of the "healthy-mindedness" his essay advocates.

But he doubted that better alternatives are available to those who would live "wholly free and disillusioned."

I share his doubts and his naturalistic idealism. Santayana's student, the poet Wallace Stevens, not only shared those doubts and naturalistic idealism but spent a lifetime converting them into song--a symphony he would entitle "the Whole of Harmonium."

Santayana was the architect of a wholly free and disillusioned spirituality; Stevens was its bard.