Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

by George Santayana

Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, the old Xenophanes, the austerer minds, moralists, naturalists, and wits, united in decrying the fanciful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was in one sense unjust; it did not consider the original justification of mythology in human nature and in the external facts. It was, like all heresy or partial scepticism, in a sense superficial and unphilosophical. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets and assumptions were as groundless, without being as natural or adequate, as the system it attacked. To a person sufficiently removed by time or by philosophy from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always appear right and heresy wrong; for he sees in orthodoxy the product of the creative mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy only the rebellion of some partial interest or partial insight against the corollaries of a formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed with hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates any great product of art or mind must always appear short-sighted and unamiable. Socrates, invoking; the local deities of brooks and meadows, or paying the debt of a cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, it is said, for a happy death), is more reasonable and noble to our mind than are the hard denials of Xenophanes or Theodoras. But in their day the revolt of the sceptics had its relative justification. The imagination had dried up, and what had once been a natural interpretation of facts now seemed an artificial addition to them. An elaborate and irrelevant world of fiction seemed to have been imposed on human credulity. Mythology was, in fact, already largely irrelevant; the experience poetized by it had been forgotten and the symbol, in its insignificance, could not be honestly or usefully retained.

The Greek philosophers, as a rule, proceeded cautiously in these matters. They passed mythology by with a conventional reverence and looked elsewhere for the true object of their personal religion. But the old mythological impulse was not yet spent; it showed itself still active in all the early philosophers who gave the godhead new incarnations congruous with the character of their respective physical systems. To the Socratic School the natural world was no longer the sphere in which divinity was to be found. They looked for the divine rather in moral and intelligible ideas. But not only did they carry the mythological instinct with them into that new field, they also retained it in the field of Nature, whenever they still regarded Nature as real. Thus Aristotle, while he rejected the anthropomorphism of the popular faith, attributing it to political exigencies, turned the forty-nine spheres, of which he conjectured that the heaven might be composed, into a pantheon of forty-nine divinities. Every primary movement, he argued, must be the expression of an eternal essence by which the movement is justified, as the movement of the mind in thinking or loving is justified by the truth or excellence of the object of thought or of love. Without such a worthy object, these spiritual activities would be irrational; and no less irrational would be the motion of the spheres, were each not obedient to the influence of some sacred and immutable principle. Forty-nine gods accordingly exist; but no more. For, since the essence of each is to be the governing ideal of a motion, the number of motions in the sky determines the number of divine first principles. The gods, we see, are still the souls of Nature; a soul without a body would be a principle without an application; there can be no gods, then, without a phenomenal function, no gods that do not appear in the operations of Nature. This astronomic mythology was surely not less poetical than that of Homer, even if, by virtue of a certain cold and abstract purity, not unworthy of the stars of which it spoke, it was more difficult and sublime. We may observe in it a last application of the ancient mythological method by which the phenomena of Nature became evidence of the existence and character of the gods.

But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the minor creative gods of Plato that correspond to them, retained too much poetic individuality for the still poorer imagination of later times. The most religious of sects during the classical decadence was that of the Stoics; in them the spirit of conformity, which is a chief part even of the religions of hope, constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally equivocal use of the word "reason" to designate the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the alien brutality of the power or law to which all the gods had been reduced. Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one, the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience pure although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, auspices, and other superstitious rites, he transformed into quasi-scientific ways of reading the book of Nature and forecasting events.

This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stoic "providence" which the sentimentality of modern apologists has been glad to confuse with the benevolent Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence making for the salvation of men. The Stoic providence excluded that essential element of benevolence; it was merely the fact that Nature was prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both in space and in time, were magically composed into one living system. Mythology thus ended with the conception of a single god whose body was the whole physical universe, whose fable was all history, and whose character was the principle of the universal natural order. No attempt was made by the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or more amiable than the evidence of experience showed it to be; the self-centred, self-sufficient Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the equality in happiness and dignity between the wise man and Zeus, all prove quite conclusively that nothing more was asked or expected of Nature than what she chose to give; to be virtuous was in man's power, and nothing else was a good to man. The universe could neither benefit nor injure him; and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of Zeus, the Stoic's conscience knew how to scorn the moral nothingness of that blank deity to which his metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the gods.

Thus the reality which the naturalistic gods had borrowed from the elements proved to be a dangerous prerogative; being real and manifest, these gods had to be conceived according to our experience of their operation, so that with every advance in scientific observation theology had to be revised, and something had to be subtracted from the personality and benevolence of the gods. The moral character originally attributed to them necessarily receded before the clearer definition of natural forces and the accumulated experience of national disasters. Finally, little remained of the gods except their names, reduced to rhetorical synonyms for the various departments of Nature; Phœbus was nothing but a bombastic way of saying the sun; Hephæstus became nothing but fire, Eros or Aphrodite nothing but love, Zeus nothing but the general force and law of Nature. Thus the gods remained real, but were no longer gods. If belief in their reality was to be kept up, they could not retain too many attributes that had no empirical manifestation. They must be reduced, as it were, to their fighting weight. All that the imagination had added to them by way of personal character, sanctity, and life must be rejected as anthropomorphism and fable.

Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. If Nature manifests the existence of a god, she must to that extent manifest his character; if she does not manifest his character, she cannot involve his existence. We observe to-day a process exactly analogous to that by which the natural divinities of Greece were reduced again to the physical or social forces from which poetry had originally evoked their forms. Many minds are grown too timid to build their religious faith unblushingly on revelation, or on that moral imagination or inward demand which revelation comes to express and to satisfy. They seek, therefore, to naturalize the Deity and to identify it with some principle of history, of Nature, or of logic. But this identification cannot be made without great concessions on both sides. The accommodations which ensue inevitably involve many equivocations, and some misrepresentations of the heterogeneous principles, now natural, now moral, which it is sought to unify. Confused and agonized by these contradictions, the natural theologian, if he keep his honesty, can only rest in the end in a chastened recognition of the facts of experience, toward which he will, no doubt, exercise his acquired habits of acquiescence and euphemism. But these habits, the survival of which gives his philosophy some air of being still a religion, will not be inherited by his disciples and successors; a pious manner may survive religious faith, but will not survive it long. The society to whom the reformer teaches a reticent and embarrassed naturalism will discard the reticence and avow the naturalism with pride. The masses of men will see no reason why they should not live out their native impulses or acquired passions without fear of that environing power of which they are, after all, the highest embodiment; while a few thinkers, devout and rational by temperament, will know how to maintain their dignity of spirit in the face of a universe of which they ask no favour save the revelation of its laws. Thus irreligion for the many and Stoicism for the few is the end of natural religion in the modern world as it was in the ancient.

But natural religion (that is, the turning of the facts and laws of Nature or of experience into an object of worship) is by no means a primitive nor an ultimate form of religion; it is rather of all the forms of religion the most unnatural and the least capable of existing without a historical and emotional setting, independent of its own essence and inconsistent with its principle. No nation has ever had a merely natural religion. What is called by that name has been the appanage of a few philosophers in ages of religious disintegration, when the habit of worship, surviving the belief in any proper object of worship, has been transferred with effort and uncertainty to the natural order which alone remained before the mind,—to the cosmos, the self, the state, or humanity. Mythology, of which natural religion is the last and most abstract phase, was originally religious only in so far as it was supernatural in so far, I mean, as the analogies of outer Nature led the poet to conceive some moral ideal, some glorious being full of youth and serenity, of passion and wisdom. Only when thus transfigured into the human could the natural seem divine. The Greeks were never idolaters, and no more worshipped the sun or moon or the whole of Nature than they did statues of bronze or marble; they worshipped only the god who had a temporal image in the temple as he had an eternal image in the sun or in the universe.

It happened, therefore, that in the decay of mythology the gods could still survive as moral ideals. The more they were cut off from their accidental foothold in the world of fact, the more clearly could they manifest their essence as expressions of the world of values. We have mentioned the fact that the greater gods of Greece were almost wholly detached from the cosmographical hints which had originally suggested their character and fable. Thus emancipated, these nobler gods could survive in the consciousness of the devout, fixed there by their purely moral significance and poetic truth. Apollo or Athena showed little or nothing of a naturalistic origin; they were patrons of life, embodiments of the ideal, objects of contemplation for souls that by prayer would rise to the semblance of the god to whom they prayed. This transformation into the moral had been going on from the beginning in the religious mind of Greece. It was really the legitimate fulfilment of that translation into the human to which mythology itself was due. But mythology had merely turned the physical into the personal and impassioned; religion was now to turn the psychical into the good. This tendency came to a vivid and rational expression in Plato. The gods, he declared, should be represented only as they were, i.e. as moral ideals. The scandal of their fables should be removed and they should be regarded as authors only of the good, in their own lives as in ours. To refer all things to the efficacy of the gods should be accounted impiety. They, like the supreme and abstract principle of all excellence which they embodied, could be the authors only of what is good.

Had this remarkable doctrine been carried out fully it would have led to important results. We should have had goodness as the criterion of divinity, to the exclusion of power. God would have become avowedly an ideal, a pattern to which the world might or might not conform. Such potential conformity would have remained dependent on causes, natural or free, with which God, not being a power, could have nothing to do. Plato and Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these lines, but they obscured its purity in their well-meant attempts to connect (more or less mythically or magically) their own Socratic principle of excellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier philosophers. The elements of confusion and pantheism which were thus introduced into the Socratic philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to the theologians of later times, in whose religion a pantheistic tendency was also latent. In the hands of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan commentators the mythical and magical part of the Greek conceptions was naturally emphasized and the rational part reinterpreted and obscured. Plato had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, a personification of the Idea of the Good, who directly or indirectly made the world in his own image, rendering it as perfect as the indeterminate Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had spoken of an intelligence, happy and self-contemplative, who was the principle of movement in the heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of Nature. Such expressions had a sound far too congruous with Mosaic doctrine not to be seized upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, who were glad to invoke the authority of classic poets and philosophers in favour of doctrines that in their Hebrew expression might so easily seem crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimilation gave to the casual myths of Plato and to the meagre though bold argumentation of Aristotle a turn and a significance which they hardly had to their authors. If we approach these philosophers as we should from the point of view of Greek literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see in them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what Plato was once actually declared to be) the disciples of Moses, we shall see that they were simply, mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods of tradition into patrons of civic discipline and art, the gods of natural philosophy into principles of intelligibility and beauty.

The creation described in the Timæus is a transparent parable. Elements which ethical reflection distinguishes in the field of experience are turned in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of fancy, into so many half-personified primitive powers; the Ideas, the Demiurgos, Chaos, the Indeterminate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has not forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmenides. He distrusts as much as they any natural or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, we can hardly do better than to take ideal or moral principles, combine them as we might so many material elements, and see how the intelligible part of existence may thus receive a quasi-explanation. God remains the creator of the good only, because what he is mythically said to create is merely that in Nature which spontaneously resembles him or conforms to his idea; only this element in Nature is intelligible or good, and therefore the principle of goodness may be said to be its cause. Thus, for example, if we chose to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue Devils only the sombre elements of that soulful compound, which, however, the evil imps would eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic and like unto themselves as its primordial texture would allow. In exactly such a way Plato, in his allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a poetical machinery of moral forces, personified and treated as agents. When the thin veil of allegory is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a splendid illustration of the Socratic philosophy; we are taught that the only science is moral science, and that, if we wish to understand the world, we must bend our minds to the definition of its qualities and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. Essences and values alone are knowable and fixed and amenable to science. If we insist on history and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with having them presented to us in allegorical form, and made to follow ethics as the Timæus follows the Republic. Natural philosophy can be nothing but a sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace the first glimmerings and the progressive manifestation in Nature of those ideas which have authority over our own minds.