Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 12 Fall 1994

              The 'Spanishness' of Santayana
Santayana1 was bom in a town famous for its encircling walls, a town like a
tower, a rock of defense amid the inhuman grandeur of the lofty Castilian
plateau: " ... Costilla, mistica y guerrera, I Castillo la gentil, humilde y bravaj
Castillo del desdin y de lafuerza2 ... " in the words of Antonio Machado, the great,
rueful laureate of those parts. That same town of Avila was famous too for hafbouring
one of the two greatest Castilian mystics, Santa Teresa, friend and mentor of St. John
of the Cross, and author of the Interior Castle, the innermost shrine where the soul
finds union and safety with God. Those two factors, domination and peace, make an
apt context for a thinker like Santayana. At the climax of his greatest work, The Realm
of Spirit, one aspect of the nature of the spiritual life is focused by a significant image:
In the animal psyche the passions follow one another or battle for supremacy, and the
distracted spirit runs helter-skelter among them, impressed by the sophistical arguments
which each of them offers for itself; but if the psyche grows integrated and rational, its
centre, which is the organ of spirit, becomes dominant, and all those eloquent passions begin
to be compared and judged, and their probable issue to be foreknown and discounted. The
waves will not be stilled, but they will now beat against a rock. And with inner security
comes a great inner clearness.3
The rock is an image of defence and domination, the latter being not an unusual
concomitant of spiritual life in the later writings of Santayana; yet there are other
passages which propound an eschewal of Will, and advocate an Ideal of charitable
detachment universal in its scope. So too, for the Christian mystic, there is a
paradoxical sense in which the soul, having renounced all things, regains them,
purified, sub specie aeternitatis, and is triumphantly dominant in its very humility.
Such conformity with an eternal and higher mode of being has ineluctably dualistic
connotations, though not, of course, in the case of an orthodox Catholic mystic, lapsing
into Manicheanism. Santayana's system, too, was not formally dualistic, and indeed
he inclined in many contexts to stress the dependence of Spirit upon Matter, which
generated and sustained it. It is nevertheless legitimate to speculate that he never really
resolved the tension in his outlook between a rhetoric of total spiritual transcendence,
and a dynamic naturalism whose logical terminus might appear to be monistic.
That irrepressible quasi-dualism was one of the features which linked Santayana
with a pervasive tradition in the civilization of Spain. A Spanish thinker
contemporaneous with Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, touched on it in the course of
1 This paper is an expanded version of what was due to be delivered at the Santayana
Conference in late May of 1992, in Avila; due to a variety of adverse circumstances, the author
was unable to attend.
2 Castile, mystic and warlike land,
Castile the noble, the humble, the untamed,
Castile the land of haughtiness and might,
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood
3 Realms of Being, One-Volume Edition, (Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., New York,
1972)824.