Santayana and tragic grandeur

Santayana and tragic grandeur

Posted on September 22nd, 2009 by Frank Wilson

I keep running into George Santayana. Last week, for example, I was rummaging in the basement and came upon a galley of Irving Singer’s book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher. I’ve only had time to read about half of it, but it’s a wonderful book. If Singer, a professor of philosophy at MIT, is as good in class as he is on paper, he must be one hell of a teacher.

I find Santayana — an atheist with a passionate attachment to Catholicism — a fascinating figure, principally because I share two of his fundamental notions. One is what he referred to as “the constructive imagination.” Here is something Singer quotes in his book:

“The systematic relations in time and space,” [Santayana] wrote, “and their dependence upon one another are the work of our imagination. … Unless human nature suffers an inconceivable change, the chief intellectual and aesthetic value of our ideas will always come from the creative action of the imagination.”

I quite agree. My own view, in fact, is that everything we experience is an imaginative construct.

The other notion that I seem to share with Santayana has to do with thisness. Singer quotes a sentence from Santayana’s The Realm of Essence: “Our distinction and glory, as well as our sorrow, will have lain in being something in particular, and in knowing what it is.”

I would go further and say that each of us — each of everything — is not merely particular, but singular. To be made in the image and likeness of God means to be unique, and to be unique means to be indefinable in terms other than yourself, which in turn means to be a mystery, even to yourself. The act of faith is grounded in the experience of knowing that one is without being able to define who or what exactly one is or why.

Santayana would surely disagree, though he might have liked the idea that what makes us most like God is our unknowableness. He would doubtless have phrased it more elegantly than I have, even though God, for him, was merely a noble metaphor, perhaps the noblest of all.

I have no interest in convincing anyone to see things as I do — in this matter, or in any others. The only authentic conclusions are those you arrive at by thinking matters through on your own. But there is some value in recounting what one thinks and why one thinks it.

Whenever I have looked as deeply into myself as I am capable of doing, I have invariably had the feeling that I was not alone. At the heart of my solitude there seemed to be some other present. It is the same presence I sense when I attend Mass or pray. Others are free to make of this what they will, even call it a delusion, but to me it has always seemed real — and it is an experience I have had from childhood on.

Santayana, for all his exquisite sensitivity to the ritual and imagery of the Catholic Church, seems to have encountered in his solitude no one other than himself. And he seems to have been one of those persons who, having made up his mind, felt compelled to remain faithful to the position he had settled on.

In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, he put it this way:

For my own part I was quite sure that life was not worth living; for if religion was false everything was worthless; and almost everything if religion was true. In this youthful pessimism I was hardly more foolish than so many amateur medievalists and religious esthetes of my generation. I saw the same alternative between Catholicism and complete disillusion: but I was never afraid of disillusion, and I have chosen it.

Richard Butler, a Dominican priest who got to know Santayana during the philosopher’s final years, when he lived in Rome in the convent of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, has written an interesting account of him called “George Santayana: Catholic Atheist”.

“I have committed myself,” Santayana told him, when the question of faith was raised. “It’s all down on paper, in my writings.” And when Sister Angela, who had faithfully cared for him during his years at the convent, raised the subject to him when Santayana was dying, his response was, “Say no more of this … I shall die as I have lived.”

I must admit there is a certain appeal to thinking that one’s life is but a momentary flicker between two vast darknesses. There is a tragic grandeur to it that I could quite easily live with. I just can’t bring myself to believe it.