Santayana's Testament

George Santayana, a wit once said, "believes that there is no God and that Mary is His mother." Last week the suavest living philosopher further compounded the paradox. At 82, he published The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (Scribner; $2.75), probably his most important book. It is also probably the most devout book ever written by an unbeliever: it suggests that' Santayana is a far better Christian, and scarcely less orthodox, than the vast majority of believers.

With it as its end product, Santayana's six decades of philosophizing may remind Christians of those tedious scientific experiments which in the end prove something that everybody had always known.

Santayana's position, which is essentially the necessity of illusion, will seem like a dubious, not to say mischievous, improve menton the orthodox position of the necessity for faith. Whether he has at las squeezed through the needle's eye, only a handful of scholars in the theological stratosphere can tell him, and only God knows.

Reluctant Unbeliever. Instructed in Catholicism as a child, Madrid-born George Santayana came to Boston to live with his mother's New England in-laws in 187 at the age of nine, studied and taught at Harvard until 1912. He then left the rude U.S. to spend the rest of his life in the nostalgic atmosphere of Europe--first in Oxford and Paris, then at last in Rome.

Since World War II cut off his royalties from the U.S., Santayana has lived in a convent run by the Little Company of Mary on Rome's Celian Hill. There he ran through the Sisters' library -- first Dante and all of Shakespeare's plays, then the Gospels in the Douai version and the lives of the saints.

Meaning of Myth. In Reason in Religion (1905) and Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923), Santayana had tried to strip life of all illusion -- which included religion -- and then proposed that the reader "entertain the illusion without succumbing to it." He held that religions were myths but that myths embodied great wisdom.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels confronts the reader with no such unpleasant choice of illusion or disillusion. Now Santayana accepts the illusion. If religion is a myth, he says, no disparagement is thereby implied, since science, philosophy, history and other "images" of the universal flux are also myths. "In a word, fate decrees that we shall take our ideas to be knowledge; and in this we are not misled. . . . Nothing in this knowledge bears to be pressed or scrutinized too closely; but most of it, if taken lightly and conventionally, as we take language, helps to carry us prosperously through life."

Having come almost full circle, Santayana now embraces most Christian doctrine as superior, because truer, than the wisdom of his beloved Greek philosophers (several of whose concepts, he says, the Christian theologians improved upon).

The crucial tenet with which he wrestles is the conventional doctrine of a static paradise in which the immortal souls of good Christians will spend eternity--"where, as in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, we should find all life paralyzed, and the sun and moon preternaturally brilliant, both standing still in the sky."

"This," says Santayana, "is a strange picture, and I am not sure that the Catholic Church is pledged to accept it." He thinks that the traditional concept of immortality "is simply a misunderstanding, perhaps a verbal misunderstanding only, of inevitable but clumsy metaphors. . . . Illusion comes in . . . when the ingrained habit of speaking metaphorically congeals into an incapacity not to think mythically."

He believes that belief in immortality can be freed from "popular or philosophic errors" and yet preserve "the wisdom of the Catholic doctrine of the soul, its moral and spiritual soundness, with the idea of Christ for its model."

Joy in Freedom. The key word in Santayana's interpretation of immortality is "self-transcendence." Says he: "There is nothing more human or more satisfying than self-transcendence; and the liberation and light that come of renouncing the will seem, when really attained, the fulfillment, not the surrender, of our inmost powers.

"There is . . . one strain of human nature that craves union with God at God's level. It may be called reason. . . . It may be called love. . . . .

"The truest lovers of God and the most ascetic are essentially joyful; because a strong spirit, that knows and despises the world, has joy enough in its very freedom. All things are its own in idea, and to none of them is it a slave. It has begun to taste the bliss of seeing earth from heaven."

Last week, as if adding a footnote to this passage, Santayana said: "I have never been happier in my life. . . . Never speak ill of old age; it is fine."

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