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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

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Interpretations of Poetry and Religion INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION George Santayana Based on the text originally published in 1900 The Santayana Edition www.iupui.edu/~santedit/sant/ PREFACE THE following volume is composed of a number of papers written at vari- ous times and already partially printed; they are now revised and gathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, from somewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea is that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry. It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of existence, and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For the dignity of religion, like that of poetry, lies precisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of the meanings and values of life, in its anticipa- tion of perfection; so that the excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw from real- ity materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we crave. It also follows from our general conception that poetry has a universal and a moral function. Its rudimentary essays in the region of fancy and pleas- ant sound, as well as its idealisation of episodes in human existence, are only partial exercises in an art that has all time and all experience for its natural subject-matter and all the possibilities of being for its ultimate theme. As re- ligion is deflected from its course when it is confused with a record of facts or of natural laws, so poetry is arrested in its development if it remains an unmeaning play of fancy without relevance to the ideals and purposes of life. In that relevance lies its highest power. As its elementary pleasantness 3 4 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion Preface 5 comes from its response to the demands of the ear, so its deepest beauty comes On the other hand, the positivistic school of criticism would seem, if our from its response to the ultimate demands of the soul. theory is right, to have overlooked the highest function of human nature. The This theory can hardly hope for much commendation either from the environing world can justify itself to the mind only by the free life which it apologists of theology or from its critics. The mass of mankind is divided fosters there. All observation is observation of brute fact, all discipline is mere into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ide- repression, until these facts digested and this discipline embodied in humane als, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of impulses become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagina- recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, — and this is all we tion, the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, religion, and art. Only propose, — although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal as conditions of these human activities can the facts of nature and history human power of discrimination. If, therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy become morally intelligible or practically important. In themselves they are should be offended at our conception, which would reduce his artful cosmos trivial incidents, gossip of the Fates, cacklings of their inexhaustible garrulity. to an allegory, all that could be said to mitigate his displeasure would be that To regard the function of man as accomplished when these chance happenings our view is even less favourable to his opponents than to himself. have been recorded by him or contributed to by his impulsive action, is to ig- The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimising its ex- nore his reason, his privilege, — shared for the rest with every living creature, pression, both theoretic and devotional, seems from this point of view to be — of using Nature as food and substance for his own life. This human life is merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarising religious aims; it not merely animal and passionate. The best and keenest part of it consists in subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith becomes an interpreta- that very gift of creation and government which, together with all the tran- tion and idealisation of human life, and retains only a stark and superfluous scendental functions of his own mind, man has significantly attributed to God principle of superstition. For meagre and abstract as such a religion may be, as to his highest ideal. Not to see in this activity the purpose and standard of it contains all the venom of absolute pretensions; it is no less cursed than the all life is to have left human nature half unread. It is to look to the removal more developed systems with a controversial unrest and with a consequent of certain incidental obstacles in the work of reason as to the solution of its undertone of constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with the same circular positive tasks. In comparison with such apathetic naturalism, all the errors and proofs in its mistaken ambition to enter the plane of vulgar reality and escape follies of religion are worthy of indulgent sympathy, since they represent an its native element of ideas. It casts a greater blight than would a civilised effort, however misguided, to interpret and to use the materials of experience orthodoxy on any joyous freedom of thought. For the respect exacted by an for moral ends, and to measure the value of reality by its relation to the ideal. establishment is limited and external, and not greater than its traditional forms The moral function of the imagination and the poetic nature of religion probably deserve, as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols form, then, the theme of the following pages. It may not be amiss to announce of moral truth. A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind re- it here, as the rather miscellaneous subjects of these essays might at first sight mains, under such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience obscure the common import of them all. is not intimidated, the imagination is not tied up. But the preoccupations of a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the soul. In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be illusion. Mythology cannot be- come science by being reduced in bulk, but it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having. I UNDERSTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND MYSTICISM WHEN we consider the situation of the human mind in Nature, its limited plasticity and few channels of communication with the outer world, we need not wonder that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence and instability in human systems of ideas. The wonder rather is that we have done so well, that in the chaos of sensations and passions that fills the mind, we have found any leisure for self-concentration and reflection, and have succeeded in gath- ering even a light harvest of experience from our distracted labours. Our oc- casional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity. Relapses into dreams are to be expected in a being whose brief existence is so like a dream; but who could have been sure of this sturdy and indomitable perseverance in the work of reason in spite of all checks and discouragements? The resources of the mind are not commensurate with its ambition. Of the five senses, three are of little use in the formation of permanent notions: a fourth, sight, is indeed vivid and luminous, but furnishes transcripts of things so highly coloured and deeply modified by the medium of sense, that a long labour of analysis and correction is needed before satisfactory conceptions can be extracted from it. For this labour, however, we are endowed with the requisite instrument. We have memory and we have certain powers of synthe- sis, abstraction, reproduction, invention, — in a word, we have understanding. But this faculty of understanding has hardly begun its work of deciphering the hieroglyphics of sense and framing an idea of reality, when it is crossed by another faculty — the imagination. Perceptions do not remain in the mind, as would be suggested by the trite simile of the seal and the wax, passive and changeless, until time wear off their sharp edges and make them fade. No, perceptions fall into the brain rather as seeds into a furrowed field or even as sparks 7 8 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism 9 into a keg of powder. Each image breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly observe all that is going on in the world, if our instincts were steady, prompt- and subterraneously, sometimes (when a passionate train is started) with a ing us to adequate reactions upon these observations, the fancy might remain sudden burst of fancy.
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