George Santayana was deeply impressed by Spinoza--he tells us this himself in many of his writings. But he could never take Spinoza whole-cloth: he obsessed about the lens-grinder and tinkered with his thought. Santayana had an itch that Spinoza could not reach to scratch. His "Moorish" side is an expression of his Alfarabian instincts.
I have no evidence that Santayana ever read Alfarabi (I doubt the latter's works were available to him in translation); but Spinoza absorbed much Alfarabian thinking through Maimonides, who revered the Turkoman master. I would argue that Santayana caught little glints of Alfarabian light during his deep reading of Spinoza, and these furtive flashes were the source of his restless dissatisfaction with his great Spanish precursor.
Here, from Santayana's wonderful late-life memoir My Host The World, are some Alfarabian notions about the relationship of philosophy and religion (p. 4):
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. A philosopher may perfectly well cultivate more than one Weltanschauung, if he has a vital philosophy of his own to qualify his adoption of each, so as to render them complementary and not contradictory. I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy could be expressed in each of them. My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, but only correcting such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function. So in 1900 I published the result of the gradual transformation of my religious sentiments. Religion was poetry intervening in life.
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