Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 06 Fall 1988

              Beauty's Ballad
and the Colors of the Gown
Greek There was once a young Prince who had come to study
Paganism the thought of the Greek Pagan tradition. Two elements of
the tradition failed to interest him. One, the rituals of sacrifice to local gods
and celebration of ancestors, had survived among the Greek by "inertia"
(IPR 41). Another, the practices of the priests, soothsayers, and magicians, was
private and eclectic. Neither element seemed to reflect the creativity of the
people among whom he had come to live. The third element, however, was
different.
Greek Greek polytheistic mythology was  the view of gods as
Mythology supernatural forces, superhuman powers, and as beings
interacting socially and emotionally with one another (IPR 40-43). Within the
structure of this mythology, the Prince watched the Greek people become
poets, extrapolating from their own experiences in their natural world of
mental events and external objects. Every individual, as a poet, "might follow
without scruple the suggestions of experience; he might attribute to the god
various activities, beneficent and maleficent, observable in the element" in
nature over which he saw the god presiding (IPR 43). Since the truth of a god
lay in his existence in the natural lives of the people, his role as a symbolic
representation of individual, natural experience (IPR 43-44), a god that
someone had painted in entirely beneficent colors was not necessarily as valid
or valuable or "true" as one that portrayed both the good and evil of a natural
element (IPR 43).
Gods in The gods of Greek mythology were real; they were poetic
Cosmos inventions that united ideas of things internal to the mind
with ideas of things outside the mind. Every god stood ready to "return to
Nature," to return to the natural experience of the persons who had inspired it,
in spite of, or, as the Prince thought, because of, its ideal and perfect nature
(IPR 44). Greek mythology presented the Prince with a Cosmos operating
under conditions not unlike the conditions that he found in Greek society. As
the Cosmic world of the gods gave order to the conflicts, opinions, and feelings
among the gods, it gave order to the conflicts, opinions, and feelings among
the Greek people. These virtues of Greek mythology, the Prince found, kept
Greek beliefs "from passing into a mere idealism and [kept] God [from
The following is an extract, being Chapter 3 of Beauty and the Beast: A Critique of Santayana's
Aesthetic Theory, an undergraduate thesis in philosophy submitted to Harvard University. The author
expresses her thanks to Professors Joel Porte and Israel Scheffler, and to the Harvard Philosophy
Department "for accepting an unorthodox thesis on an unorthodox subject." Abbreviations for the
works cited in this chapter are: IPR for Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Scribner's, New York,
1900); RR for Reason in Religion (Dover, New York, 1982).