Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

by George Santayana

Neo-Platonism arose in the midst of the same conditions as Christianity. There was weariness and disgust with the life of nature, decay of political virtue, desire for some personal and supernatural good. It was hardly necessary to preach the doctrine of original sin to that society; the visible blight that had fallen on classic civilization was proof enough of that. What it was necessary to preach was redemption. It was necessary to point to some sphere of refuge and of healthful resort, where the ignominies and the frivolities of this world might be forgotten, and where the hunger of a heart left empty by its corroding passions might be finally satisfied. But where find such a supernatural world? By what revelation learn its nature and be assured of its existence?

Neo-Platonism opened vistas into the supernatural, but the avenues of approach which it had chosen and the principle which had given form to its system foredoomed it to failure as a religion. This avenue was dialectic, and this principle the hypostasis of abstractions. Plato had pointed out this path in his genial allegories. He had, by a poetical figure, turned the ideas of reason into the component forces of creation. This was, with him, a method of expression, but being the only method he was inclined to employ, it naturally entangled and occasionally, perhaps, deceived his intelligence; for a poet easily mistakes his inspired tropes for the physiology of Nature. Yet Platonic dogma, even when meant as such, retained the transparency and significance of a myth; philosophy was still a language for the expression of experience, and dialectic a method and not a creed. But the master's counters, current during six centuries of intellectual decadence, had become his disciples' money. Each of his abstractions seemed to them a discovery, each of his metaphors a revelation. The myths of the great dialogues, and, above all, the fanciful machinery of the Timæus, interpreted with an incredible literalness and naive earnestness, such as only Biblical exegesis can rival, formed the starting point of the new revelation. The method and insight thus obtained were then employed in filling the lacunæ of the system and spreading its wings wider and wider, until a prodigious hierarchy of supernatural existences had been invented, from which the natural world was made to depend as a last link and lowest emanation.

The baselessness and elaboration of this theology were, of course, far from being obstacles to its success in such an age. On the contrary, the less evidence could be found in common experience for what a man appeared to know, the more deeply, people inferred, must he be versed in supernatural lore, and the greater, accordingly, was his authority. Nor was the spell of personal genius and even holiness wanting in the leaders of the new philosophy to lend it colour and persuasiveness with the many, to whom metaphysical conceptions are less impressive than is an eloquent personality, or a reputation for miraculous powers. Plotinus, to speak only of the greatest of the sect, had, in fact, a notable success in his day. His lectures at Rome, we are told, were attended by all the fashion and intellect of the capital; and his large and systematic thought, his subtlety and precision, his comparatively sober eloquence, and his assurance, if we may say so, in treading the clouds, have made him at all times a great authority with those persons who look in philosophy rather for impressive results than for solid foundations. His contemporaries were eminently persons of that type. A hungry man, when you bring him bread, does not stop to make scrupulous inquiries about the mill or the oven from which you bring it.

But the trouble was that the bread of Plotinus was a stone. The heart cannot feed on thin and elaborate abstractions, irrelevant to its needs and divorced from the natural objects of its interest. Men will often accept the baldest fictions as truths; but it is impossible for them to give a human meaning to vacuous conceptions, or to grow to love the categories of logic, interweaving their image with the actions and emotions of daily life. Religion must spring from the people; it must draw its form from tradition and its substance from the national imagination and conscience. Neo-Platonism drew both form and substance from a system of abstract thought. Its gods were still-born, being generated by logical dichotomy. Only in the lower purlieus of the system, filled in by accepting current superstitions, was there any contact with something like vital religious forces. But those minor elements—hopes and fears about another world, fasts and penances, ecstasies and marvels—had no necessary relation to that metaphysical system. Such practices could be found in every religion, in every philosophical sect of the time. The Alexandrian dialectic of the supernatural accordingly remained a mere schema or skeleton, to be filled in with the materials of some real religion, if such a religion should arise. As such a schema the Neo-Platonic system actually passed over to Christian theology, furnishing the latter with its categories, its language, and its speculative method. But that dialectic served in Christianity to give form to a religious substance furnished by Hebrew and apostolic tradition, a religious substance such as, after the Pagan religion was discredited, Neo-Platonism necessarily lacked and was powerless to generate.

We have mentioned apostolic tradition. It is fortunately not requisite for our purpose to discuss the origin of this tradition, much less to decide how much of what the Christian Church eventually taught might be traced to its Founder. That is a point which even the most thorough scholars seem still to decide mainly by their prejudices, perhaps because other material is lacking on which to base a decision. For our present object we may admit the most extreme hypotheses as equally possible. The whole body of Catholic doctrine may have been contained in the oral teaching of Christ; or, on the other hand, a historical Jesus may not have existed at all, or may have been one among many obscure Jewish revolutionists, the one who, by accident, came afterward to be regarded as the initiator of a movement to which all sorts of forces contributed, and with which he had really had nothing to do. In either case the fact remains which alone interests us here; that after three or four centuries of confused struggles, an institution emerged which called itself the Catholic Church. This church, possessed of a recognized hierarchy and a recognized dogma, triumphed, both over the ancient religion, which it called Paganism, and over its many collateral rivals, which it called heresies. Why did it triumph? What was there in its novel dogma and practice that enchained the minds that Paganism could retain no longer, and that would not be content with Neo-Platonism, native, philosophical, and pliable as that system was?

The answer, to be adequate, would have to be long; but perhaps we may indicate the spirit in which it ought to be conceived. Paganism was a religion, but was discarded because it was not supernatural: Neo-Platonism could not be maintained because it was not a religion. Christianity was both. It had its roots in a national faith, moulded by the trials and passions of a singularly religious people; that connection with Judaism gave Christianity a foothold in history, a definite dogmatic nucleus, which it was a true instinct in the Church never to abandon, much as certain speculative heresies might cry out against the unnatural union of a theory of redemption with one of creation, and of a world-denying ascetic idealism, which Christianity was essentially, with the national laws, the crude deism, and the strenuous worldliness of the ancient Jews. However, had the Gnostic or Manichæan heresies been victorious, Christianity would have been reduced to a floating speculation: its hard kernel of positive dogma, of Scripture, and of hieratic tradition would have been dissolved. It would have ceased to represent antiquity or to hand down an ancestral piety: in fine, by its eagerness to express itself as a perfect philosophy, it would have ceased to be a religion. How essential an element its Hebraism was, we can see now by the study of Protestantism, a group of heresies in which the practical instincts and sentimental needs of the Teutonic race found expression, by throwing over more or less completely the Catholic dogma and ritual. Yet in this revolution the Protestants maintained, or rather increased, the intensity of their religious consciousness, chiefly by absorbing the elements of Hebrew law and prophecy which they could find in the Bible and casting into that traditional form their personal conscience or their national ideals.

How inadequate, on the other hand, this Hebraic element would have been to constitute the supernatural religion that was now needed, appears very clearly from the case of Philo Judæus. Here was a man, heir to all the piety and fervour of his race, who at the same time was a Neo-Platonist three hundred years before Plotinus and, as it were, the first Father of the Church. But his religion, being national, was not communicable and, being positivistic, was at fundamental odds with the spirit of his philosophy. It remained, therefore, as a merely personal treasure and heirloom, the possession of his private life: his disciples, had he had any, must either have been Jews themselves or else must have been the followers merely of his philosophy. His religion could not have passed to them; they would have regarded it, as we might regard the Christianity of Kant or the wife-worship of Comte, as a private circumstance, a detached trait, less damaging, perhaps, to his philosophy than favourable to his loyal heart.

Philo, in his commentaries on the Bible, sought to envelop and transform every detail in the light of Platonic metaphysics. His interpretations are often violent, but the ingenuous artifice of them would have delighted his contemporaries as much as himself, and was adopted afterward by all the Fathers and theologians of the Church. Philo's theology was thus a success, even a model; yet he failed, because of the inadequacy of his religion. What interest, what relevance, could it have for any Gentile to hear about the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt or out of Babylon, or about circumcision and prescribed meats, or about the sacrifices in the Temple? What charm or credibility could he find in further promises of glorious kingdoms, flowing with milk and honey? Such images might later appeal to the imagination of New England Puritans and make a religion for them: but what meaning could they have to the weary Pagan? No doubt the Jews carried with them an ideal of righteousness, and prosperity; but the Gentile was sick of heroes and high priests and founders of cities. Stoic virtues were as vain in his eyes as Sybaritic joys. He did not wish his passions to be flattered, not even his pride or the passion for a social Utopia. He wished his passions to be mortified and his soul to be redeemed. He would not look for a Messiah, unless he could find him on a cross.

That is the essence of the matter. What overcame the world, because it was what the world desired, was not a moral reform—for that was preached by every sect; not an ascetic regimen—for that was practised by heathen gymnosophists and Pagan philosophers; not brotherly love within the Church—for the Jews had and have that at least in equal measure; but what overcame the world was what Saint Paul said he would always preach: Christ and him crucified. Therein was a new poetry, a new ideal, a new God. Therein was the transcript of the real experience of humanity, as men found it in their inmost souls and as they were dimly aware of it in universal history. The moving power was a fable—for who stopped to question whether its elements were historical, if only its meaning were profound and its inspiration contagious? This fable had points of attachment to real life in a visible brotherhood and in an extant worship, as well as in the religious past of a whole people. At the same time it carried the imagination into a new sphere; it sanctified the poverty and sorrow at which Paganism had shuddered; it awakened tenderer emotions, revealed more human objects of adoration, and furnished subtler instruments of grace. It was a whole world of poetry descended among men, like the angels at the Nativity, doubling, as it were, their habitation, so that they might move through supernatural realms in the spirit while they walked the earth in the flesh. The consciousness of new loves, new duties, fresh consolations, and luminous unutterable hopes accompanied them wherever they went. They stopped willingly in the midst of their business for recollection, like men in love; they sought to stimulate their imaginations, to focus, as it were, the long vistas of an invisible landscape.

If the importunity of affairs or of ill-subdued passions disturbed that dream, they could still return to it at leisure in the solitude of some shrine or under the spell of some canticle or of some sacramental image; and meantime they could keep their faith in reserve as their secret and their resource. The longer the vision lasted and the steadier it became, the more closely, of course, was it intertwined with daily acts and common affections; and as real life gradually enriched that vision with its suggestions, so religion in turn gradually coloured common life with its unearthly light. In the saint, in the soul that had become already the perpetual citizen of that higher sphere, nothing in this world remained without reference to the other, nor was anything done save for a supernatural end. Thus the redemption was actually accomplished and the soul was lifted above the conditions of this life, so that death itself could bring but a slight and unessential change of environment.