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WorkGeorge Santayana

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

Santayana's case that religion is poetry that has entered into conduct, and loses its wisdom once it is read as literal fact.

by George Santayana259 passages held

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First published
(aged 37)
Original language
English

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Overview

In April 1900 William James wrote to George Herbert Palmer, his colleague in Harvard's philosophy department, about the new book by their younger colleague. He had read it with delight, he said, and at last understood Santayana as a man; but he judged the philosophy rotten through, the work of a dying Latin culture lecturing American barbarians at the hour of their triumph. With James's permission, Palmer passed the letter on to Santayana, who wrote back to defend himself. What had provoked James was an account of religion that suited neither believers nor debunkers. Religion, the book argues, is poetry that has entered into conduct. Its stories and doctrines are the imagination's way of expressing what people have learned about living, and they are true in that sense, as a great poem is true. Read as literal reports about the world, they turn into bad science, and the practical wisdom they carried is lost with the poetry. That cut against James, who was then preparing the Edinburgh lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience and who judged a belief by the difference it made to a life. In England, where Santayana had finished the manuscript, at Oxford, in the summer of 1899, the book found warmer readers: the novelist Henry James, William's brother, is reported to have said he would go to great lengths to meet its author.

Key concepts

What does it mean to call religion poetry that has entered into conduct?

That religion and poetry are one thing in essence and differ in how they attach to practical life. The stories, doctrines and rites a poem offers for contemplation are, in a religion, lived by: sworn on, obeyed, built into family and public conscience. Held that way they carry real wisdom about living. Read as literal reports about the world, they become bad science, and the wisdom goes with the poetry.

What does Santayana mean by ‘Platonic love’?

Two transformations: of the appreciation of beautiful things into the worship of an ideal beauty, and of the love of particular persons into the love of God. Santayana notes that the phrase is constantly used, often ironically, and seldom understood. He sets out to give these mystical formulas a more human meaning by showing how the experience of loving first prompted poets and philosophers to speak them.

What is ‘the poetry of barbarism’, and whom does it describe?

Poetry that treats passion as its own excuse for being. The barbarian, in Santayana’s definition, domesticates his passions neither by understanding their cause nor by conceiving their ideal goal. Whitman and Browning are his examples: he grants that their vision is genuine and their grasp of experience direct, but finds it carried only a short distance, in rebellion against the discipline of classic and Christian tradition.

What is poetry at its best doing, according to this book?

Showing us the meaning of the experience we have actually had. Poetry is not at its best, Santayana writes, when it depicts a further possible experience, but when, by feigning something impossible as experience, it initiates us into the meaning of the real one. Hence his formula that the highest ideality is the comprehension of the real: a poet’s dream must find its supports in the world or be blown back among the ghosts.

Which part of mysticism does Santayana actually respect?

Its aesthetic side: an interest in large unities and cosmic laws, the contemplative mind dropping its practical cares. That, he says, is legitimate, and gives a foretaste of the ideal life. What he rejects is the claim to transcend everything, which no mystic achieves; the real art, he observes drily, is to be mystical in spots, aiming the heavy guns of transcendental philosophy only at the ideas one finds galling.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Religion as Poetry That Has Entered Into Conduct

Are the stories of a religion true? True as a great poem is true, Santayana answers, and false the moment they are read as reports about the world.

Doctrines and myths are the imagination’s way of expressing what people have learned about living, and their wisdom lies in that expression. Taken literally, a doctrine becomes bad science, and the practical wisdom it carried is lost along with the poetry. The position suited neither believers, who wanted their creeds to be facts, nor debunkers, who thought the facts disposed of them. William James, who judged a belief by the difference it made to a life, found the whole philosophy rotten, and said so.

  • religion
  • poetry
  • imagination
  • mythology
  • christianity
  • ritual
  • immortality
  • science
  • rationality
  • naturalism
  • modernity

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Love Raised Into an Ideal

When a poet loves one person and ends by praising the good itself, has the passion been betrayed or fulfilled? The Platonic love poets of Italy are the test case.

Idealization, for Santayana, is what the imagination does with any strong feeling: it keeps the feeling’s direction and drops the accidents of its occasion. In the Italian poets of Platonic love a passion for a particular person is carried, stage by stage, toward an object no person could be, and the poetry is the record of that ascent. He treats the process as natural rather than supernatural, the same work of imagination that builds religions, and so as something to be judged by what it does for the life that performs it.

  • platonic love
  • love
  • idealization
  • ideals
  • idealism
  • passion
  • emotion
  • beauty

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Mystics and Barbarians: Imagination Without Order

What is lost when imagination refuses to give experience a shape? The mystic dissolves every form, the modern poet piles up sensation, and both fail at the same task.

Poetry at its height, the book argues, does what religion does: it builds out of experience a world of ideals a person could live by. Mysticism fails by abandoning the understanding, preferring an indistinct intensity to any definite object. Whitman and Browning fail from the other side, in the chapter on the poetry of barbarism: abundant, vivid and passionate, they give experience its full force and no rational order. Against both, Santayana sets poetry that orders passion into an ideal world, the task The Life of Reason would later develop at length.

  • mysticism
  • perception
  • reason
  • metaphysics
  • language
  • aesthetics
  • drama
  • history

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Within this work

passages held
259
distinct concepts
465
by passages held, corpus-wide
#285

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “poetry”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
aestheticspoetry15
mythologyreligion12
poetryreligion11
aestheticsimagination10
imaginationpoetry10
aestheticsreligion8
imaginationreligion8
idealismreligion5
imaginationreason5
mysticismreason5
reasonreligion5
idealismreason4
aestheticsidealism3
aestheticsmysticism3
idealismimagination3
idealismpoetry3
poetryreason3
aestheticsreason2
imaginationmysticism2
mysticismreligion2
mythologypoetry2
idealismmythology1
imaginationmythology1
mysticismmythology1
mysticismpoetry1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

    The earliest of Santayana's prose books, following a volume of sonnets, and the one he later dismissed most bluntly; the psychological method it relies on is one his later philosophy moved away from.

     EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion you are here EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States

    The American sequel to "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in Winds of Doctrine, and the fullest record Santayana left of his Harvard teachers before his memoirs.

     EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
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