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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Devilish deep-thinking, 10 Aug 2001
When T. S. Eliot delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926 he discussed George Santayana's contribution to idealist philosophy as a form of mysticism rather than a coherent metaphysical system. 'It is no accident that the town of Avila near Madrid has two glories', he quipped, 'that of having given birth to St Theresa [sic] and that of having given birth to Mr George Santayana'. In spite of this retrospective irony, it is likely that Santayana was the first catholic intellect to play a part in Eliot's spiritual and intellectual development. I use the word 'catholic' in the sense that it is derived from the Greek 'katholikos'. To be catholic is to think within the wide bounds of 'universal' or 'general' Christianity. Santayana himself expressed something along these lines in his anthology, "Little Essays" (1920), albeit somewhat harshly. Santayana's essays define protestantism as 'vaguely assured' of its 'worldly vocation'. Its 'energies' are as 'pure but unchasened' as those of a 'healthy child'- and 'the barbarian'. Possessed by a spirit of temporal venture, the protestant mind 'rejects the unworldly, disenchanted and ascetic mood of the gospel in favour of worldly success and prosperity'. It is this religious perspective that, two decades earlier, Santayana dramatized in "Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy" (1899), a play he described as a 'philosophy contained in an image'.Christian orthodoxy depends upon the figure of Satan, whether literal or metaphorical, to account for the presence of evil in a world crested by a God who is wholly good. There must exist an 'Alter deus', or 'Deus inversus' whose deviation from good initiated evil. This adversary is not a representation of evil but its active agent. Santayana reinterprets this perspective to depict Lucifer's sin as born, not out of evil, which does not yet exist, but from out of the nobility of his nature. Lucifer deviates from good because of his overwhelming desire for absolute good. His refusal to tolerate the imperfections of creation leads him to challenge the divine creator who, according to Santayana, is subject to the same lack of moral absolutes. Lucifer's quest for perfection disguises a hubris that condemns him to exist in infernal isolation. Santayana's Lucifer is a figure in the mould of Milton's Satan and Goethe's Faust. This text will find a readership among those concerned with the long tradition of this archetype in literary, religious, or intellectual history. This book will appeal to students of American idealist philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Noël O'Sullivan has written a straightforward introduction to the philosophy of Santayana for the Thinkers of Our Time series (The Claridge Press). A more thorough critique by Timothy L. S. Sprigge is published by Routledge in The Arguments of the Philosophers series. Readers who wish to learn more of Santayana's impact on T. S. Eliot would do well to purchase "On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry" edited and introduced by Ronald Schuchard.
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