Natural and Ultimate Religion

One hundred years ago this month, George Santayana was bom in Spain. If that urbane cosmopolitan may be said ever to have had a home, it was in Avila: holy and hard Avila, grim and noble against the sierra, where Torquemada lies in his tomb in the cathedral. If the crusading spirit of Avila, or the mysticism of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, never touched Santayana—why, still all his life he confessed the genius of Christianity, finding in the symbols of the Church truths more lofty than the smug or shallow philosophical babel of his time. It was in a Roman convent that he died, eleven years ago.

Much to the chagrin of his detractors, Santayana has grown in reputation during the past decade. He wrote with beauty and wit, which prejudiced against him nearly all his professional colleagues; with a genial contempt, he turned aside from ideology, to the displeasure of ideologues. And, though he was skeptical to the bone, his incredulity at the neat fallacies of positivism and pragmatism far exceeded his dissent from religious tradition—a kind of skepticism not calculated to endear him to the evangels of Progress.. Yet through power of mind, and of style, already he has eclipsed the heavy treatises of his contemporaries.

GS

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George Santayana

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One hundred years ago this month, George Santayana was bom in Spain. If that urbane cosmopolitan may be said ever to have had a home, it was in Avila: holy and hard Avila, grim and noble against the sierra, where Torquemada lies in his tomb in the cathedral. If the crusading spirit of Avila, or the mysticism of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, never touched Santayana—why, still all his life he confessed the genius of Christianity, finding in the symbols of the Church truths more lofty than the smug or shallow philosophical babel of his time. It was in a Roman convent that he died, eleven years ago.

Much to the chagrin of his detractors, Santayana has grown in reputation during the past decade. He wrote with beauty and wit, which prejudiced against him nearly all his professional colleagues; with a genial contempt, he turned aside from ideology, to the displeasure of ideologues. And, though he was skeptical to the bone, his incredulity at the neat fallacies of positivism and pragmatism far exceeded his dissent from religious tradition—a kind of skepticism not calculated to endear him to the evangels of Progress.. Yet through power of mind, and of style, already he has eclipsed the heavy treatises of his contemporaries.