Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 16 Fall 1998

              Ultimate Religion
Immediately upon commencing his address to mark the tercentenary of the birth of
Spinoza, Santayana poses the question prompted by the occasion.1 He asks, "What
inmost allegiance, what ultimate religion, would be proper to a wholly free and
disillusioned spirit?"2 To my mind, no better question could be asked of a philosopher
— assuming that we give the name "philosopher" to one who would address such a
question with honesty and learning. "What inmost allegiance, what ultimate religion,
would be proper to a wholly free and disillusioned spirit?" The question recalls us at
once to the most urgent and fundamental concerns, and thinkers who-have something
helpful to say about them are justly revered. But it is difficult to carry out the mission.
Santayana asks for the ultimate allegiance of a free and disillusioned spirit, and such
beings are rare. It goes without saying that a moral philosopher must possess a medley
of traits: he must be intelligent, imaginative, discerning, learned, and of worldly
experience. Unusual as these traits are, the moralist must also be a man of exceptional
courage, discipline, and honesty. Only then can he be free and disillusioned. Santayana
repeatedly remarks that philosophies have infrequently met these standards. They have
typically been shams, as he likes to say it, projections onto the universe of the traits that
their authors have craved to find there — concocted of a stew of prejudice, egotism, and
weakness. Many thinkers have formulated and achieved an "inmost allegiance," but they
have typically accomplished it by some form of dishonesty or evasion.
Few philosophers have exceeded Santayana in the judgment that the world is
resistant to human endeavor and unresponsive to the yearnings of the soul. In such an
inhospitable world, the temptation to avoid the truth is powerful, and the strength to be
candid and forthright is scarce. We might even ask why philosophy should be
undertaken at all. Why should anyone expose himself to such a forbidding and dreary
prospect with so little hope of reward? Perhaps someone who is fully disillusioned ought
to deny the very possibility of an ultimate religion, and many philosophers have taken
this path. Santayana believed, however, that such a good can be achieved. In any case,
he had contempt for those who lacked the requisite candor. He loathed pretense, and he
found courage and honesty ennobling, even in failure.
Spinoza is one of those free and disillusioned spirits. He is praised as one of those
rare possessors of the traits of a true philosopher and who in consequence of these very
qualities conceived and enjoyed a deep and abiding good, declaring himself blessed.
"[T]he singularity of Spinoza, at least in the modern world," Santayana writes, "was that
he facilitated this moral victory by no dubious postulates. He did not ask God to meet
him half way: he did not whitewash the facts, as the facts appear to clear reason, or as
they appeared to the science of his day. He solved the problem of the spiritual life after
1 This paper is a revision of the paper presented to the Santayana Society in Philadelphia on
December 29, 1997. I am grateful for the many comments on my theses made on that occasion,
especially those of Henry Samuel Levinson and, secondly, Herman Saatkamp. My revisions are minor,
and they do not attempt to accommodate my critics. Such an endeavor would require many more pages!
2 George Santayana, "Ultimate Religion" a paper read in the Domus Spinozana at the Hague
for the commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Spinoza. Published in The Works of George
Santayana, Triton Edition, Volume X (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), pp. 243-257. We
refer to this paper as ur; all references having only the page number are to UR. The above quotation is
from p. 245.