The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: Or, God in Man: A Critical Essay by George Santayana
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The Philosophical Roots of American Populism

George Santayana, from his elevated position as professor at Harvard College, was a major force in America philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a prolific writer but his greatest influence was probably with and through his students, who included T S Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, and Wallace Stevens, among many other literary names.

Santayana self-identified as an atheist-Catholic, reflecting his birth in Spain to a Catholic family. Nonetheless, he was respectful and even appreciative of religious wisdom, at least when he found it compatible with his own philosophy. William James was his friend and mentor and encouraged him in his literary style of philosophical reasoning. He was on friendly terms with the other American Pragmatists, including C S Peirce and Josiah Royce; and although he wrote the first extended exposition about Pragmatism (The Life of Reason), he never identified himself with that school of thought, and much of his philosophy is incompatible with it.

Because he created no philosophical ‘school’, his views seem to have been disseminated and diffused rather than passed on in an academic way into American intellectual culture. The dominance of Harvard philosophy came to an end during WWI, which also marked a discontinuity in philosophical issues and methods. Neither his brand of literary philosophy nor Pragmatism survived as academic traditions. Consequently Santayana’s importance is subject to debate. He is probably known today more for his aphorisms than his philosophical writings.

Nevertheless, Santayana remains worthy of consideration today for at least one good reason: he articulated the individualism embedded in America culture, possibly better than any other contemporary American philosopher. He didn’t invent this individualistic stance but he gave it weight. This individualism is arguably his most forceful legacy, and permeates much of the populism that increasingly has manifested itself in the United States over the last two decades.

It therefore seems to me of some importance to understand the underlying ethos of Santayana’s philosophy. I have written several other pieces on his aesthetics and his analysis of Platonic philosophy elsewhere (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). My intention here is to use his The Idea of Christ in the Gospels to excavate a bit more of his reasoning and evaluate its relevance to current issues.

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Written during the war against European fascism and published in 1946, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels is I think Santayana’s most mature statement of his philosophical position. Although its argument is a critique of religion, the elements of this argument are, as it were, standard-issue Santayana tropes. Because of his expository style it is necessary to select carefully the elements that constitute structure as opposed to decoration. Some distortion is inevitable therefore. Nevertheless, I think this uncovering to bare wood shows that things might not be all that on the level or weather-tight in the Santayana edifice.

He begins his argument in good literary fashion with what is really a concise summary of his story. “The natural man,” he says, “never feels more passive, or more at a loss to explain his performance, than when he has a brilliant thought or does impulsively some unexpectedly some heroic or shameful action.” This is as much a statement of intent as it is an observation of his own reaction to life. And shortly thereafter he makes the connection to both his subject and his philosophy clear: “... inspiration far more primitive and pervasive than we commonly suppose... marks the birth of spirit.”

Spirit is a central category for Santayana. He uses it in virtually all his work. What he means by spirit is very specific and also somewhat idiosyncratic. Spirit cannot exist, for Santayana, without a body. It is an aspect of the material world not a part of some other dimension temporarily united with a human being. The spirit is the motivating force within the body; it is what makes the body human, or presumably any other living being.

And not just living beings. Spirit is also a component of institutions. “To be a spirit without a body is as impossible for the Church as it is for a believer.” This is important for his critique of the Church, by which he primarily means the Roman Church. He uses the idea of corporate spirit to correctly point out that it was the Church which authorised the gospels, not the other way round.

It is also the Church which constructed a doctrinal and hierarchical structure. It became established in the world and when it did, “... as was inevitable and requisite... spirit in it could not retain its primacy.” Despite this overwhelming of the spirit by the administrative and political consideration of the Church body, the spirit, “... continues to work in the lump.” Just why the practical concerns of the Church should imply the degrading of spirit is not specified. Nor is the operation of the spirit on the “lump” discussed.

From that point, Santayana traces the activity of spirit in the record of the Bible of both the old and new testaments. His views are interesting, for example: the Bible throughout “assumes that the universe is a system of bodies more or less animated by spirit”; Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree is a condemnation of those who ignore the “divine opportunities” revealed by the spirit; Christ himself represents divine creativity, the “absolute prerogative” of the ultimate Spirit, which Santayana considers “eminently anthropomorphic” not as a criticism but in sympathetic understanding.

But at this point in his story, Santayana starts making what appear to be contradictory claims. After citing ‘love’ or more precisely ‘Christian charity’ as the central virtue of the faith, he then interprets love as the “Moral freedom [of] ... the physically undiscoverable love of the spirit for that which it truly loves.” The opaqueness of both love and its object is startling. Santayana suggests that neither can ever be articulated. Yet he then goes on to say:

The idea of God as spirit, loving the spirit in us and realizing in Himself all that spirit in us looks to as its supreme good, is evidently prophetic; that is, it sees in its vision as an accomplished fact, though hidden from vulgar apprehension, a secret ideal of the heart, and helps to render that ideal clearer and more communicable... Holiness is the triumph of the spirit over the other elements of human nature.

Spirit, and God as ultimate spirit, has already been established in the book as indecipherable. In his other writings he treats the spirit as impossible to discern or describe in any meaningful detail much less to change by human intervention. Yet here Santayana talks about a ‘vision’ with the character of fact. Still, this fact is not factual in any obvious way. It remains ‘secret’ and ‘hidden’, two qualities that would seem to define anything but a fact. And he believes that this entirely inarticulate ‘fact’ can become even more articulate, and then, suddenly, ‘communicable’, presumably to oneself and to others.

Santayana’s final sentence about holiness in the quotation above is perhaps the most disturbing part of his conclusion. In the earlier parts of the book, he has lamented the subjugation of spirit. But his consistent view throughout his writings, as well as here, is that the spirit is destructive of all forms of social structure. Not just the Church, but the State, and corporate organisation in general, he recognises as the enemy of spirit. On a personal level, his view of holiness is effectively a sacramentalisation of the Freudian Id, that unconscious component of the psyche which provokes uncontrolled and irrational behaviour.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels is consistent with his other writings over the course of his career. All contain the same sort of deified instinctual unconscious. The consequences of this consistency for either individual mental/spiritual health or the stability/habitability of society are immense and immensely frightening if they were ever to be taken seriously. Fortunately they have not in any formal way. But, judging by the recent elections and subsequent political activity in the United States, it appears that the populist and evangelical nihilist sentiment that is so evident has come from one of America’s least read philosophers.

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