Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 20 Fall 2002

              Santayana's God
Santayana himself offered "apologias" and "general confessions," and it
therefore may be appropriate that I begin by confessing that I originally
conceived of this paper as a defense of Santayana against the charge of atheism.
I had been asked to offer a response to, or a comment on, Irving Singer's book,
George Santayana, Literary Philosopher; as it happened, I had just completed a
review of Mr. Singer's book for the New England Quarterly, and, if I may quote
myself, I said: "No better introduction to its subject exists than Irving Singer's
George Santayana, Literary Philosopher." I did notice, however, that Santayana was
identified there as an atheist, and I did not wish to agree with that designation.1
Was my understanding of Santayana fundamentally flawed? I do not think of
myself as an atheist and I had not thought of Santayana as atheistic. I sometimes
think of challenging my atheist friends by asking them, "Where did you come from?"
— confident that they will at least acknowledge Santayana's realm of matter,
whether they had ever heard of it by that name or not. I have even thought of
adapting Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley as an argument against atheism,
kicking a rock and pronouncing: "There you are: God!" In any case, my impulse was
to defend Santayana against the charge of atheism. An atheist, we commonly
understand, is a person who says that there is no God, and that is not the way I
understand Santayana.
At first I thought that all I really needed to do was to show that Santayana, in
according all the power in the universe to the realm of matter, finding in that realm
something analogous to Jehovah and to God the Father, was fundamentally as pious
as Spinoza. I ended, however, by becoming convinced that Santayana is indeed
atheistic, but (as so often happens with terms once they become Santayana-ized) not
in the usual sense. He is atheistic in refusing to set up any gods whatever —
including, as we shall see, even Spinoza's Deus sive Natura. But I would still insist
that one of the last things Santayana should be accused of is iconoclastic atheism; if
God is dead, Santayana had nothing to do with it.
In the concluding pages of his one-volume edition of Realms of Being, Santayana
says:
When people ask, Does God exist? The question is really verbal. They are asking whether the
reality signified by the notion of God, if we understood that reality better, could still bear the
name of God, or had better be designated by some other word. This is at bottom the whole
question in dispute between theists and atheists.
Now in this verbal sense, and in respect to popular religion that thinks of God as the creator
of the world and the dispenser of fortune, my philosophy is atheistic. It puts all substance and
power into the realm of matter; and although this realm presupposes essence, creates spirit, and
involves truth, yet in its dynamic procedure it takes no account of those accompaniments, and
excludes the spiritual and moral vitality implied in the word God. God, at least for Jews,
Christians, and Moslems, must be a power that is a spirit, and a spirit mat is a sovereign power.
As I place spirit and power at opposite ends of the ontologicai scale, and of cosmic evolution,
making spirit the fruit and enjoyment of power, but no part of its radical energy, I must be
pronounced an atheist in this company. (838-39)
i
This paper was presented to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in Atlanta on December
29,2001.