Among
the thinkers of this passing century that offer themselves to the future for its
reflection, Santayana must stand out as a singular figure, one whose thought is
dedicated to the overarching possibility of the spiritual life undertaken without
religious faith or metaphysical dogma.(1) Among the throngs that fill the philosophical
bestiary of the 20th Century, Santayana may be the one genuine contemplative of
note.(2) The majority of doctrines dominant in the century have been directed
either toward the goal of action (Marxism, pragmatism, existentialism) or the
problem of knowledge, truth and meaning (positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology).
Genuinely contemplative philosophies cannot be classified with either one of these
categories, however much they may touch upon common themes. Given that Santayana
sought to find a basis for philosophy as a contemplative life by grafting the
classical doctrine of essence onto the modernist theory of matter as power, his
thought engages nearly the whole of the history of the west, while ranging into
the field of the systems of India as well. This may seem a puzzling bequest to
the future from this century so filled with violence and wreckage. If the true
historical parameter of the century is measured by events, we might find that
it could be dated from 1914 to 1991, from the onset of World War I to the exhausted
collapse of the Soviet Union, a period in which the world was either preparing
for war or actively engaged in it. But the violence of the century must include
the rapid and constant reorganization of life forced upon the globe by technologies
some of whose impact is as yet hardly discerned. It is possible to view Santayana
against this backdrop as a piece of intellectual nostalgia, rather like a beautiful
old church in a buzzing urban center that someone forgot to bulldoze to the ground.
I
think such a response would be unfortunate because the spiritual life is a perennial
concern for us, one that politics and technology cannot address however successfully
or intelligently managed they may be. The thought of Santayana offers then a permanent
opportunity to explore the dimensions of the spiritual life without the confusions
introduced by archaic physics or forgotten political aspirations. In the words
of William James, "Mystical classics have ... neither birthday nor native
land" and so have the opportunity to be as accessible or inaccessible as
the contingent features of the world permit.(3) Santayana's writings may be read
from this angle, and it is this approach I will take myself. Thus the problem
which I intend to explore does not try to address Santayana as a figure of the
20th century or even as an "American" or "pragmatist" of whatever
stripe. Rather, I want to raise an internal issue to the prospect of the spiritual
discipline or askesis presented especially in Santayana's later philosophy, the
problem of the relation of the spiritual and the moral lives. What, if anything,
does the quest for a beatific vision have to do with the "problem of evil"
in a naturalistic mysticism such as Santayana's? In this essay I will explore
Santayana's vision of the spiritual life as a naturalistic contemplative discipline
in relation to Platonism and Neo-Platonism.(4) In response to Santayana's conclusion
that the spiritual and moral lives are somewhat at variance with each other, I
offer the example of Buddhism which, though it accepts some of Santayana's fundamental
premises, arrives at a different understanding of how these two lives are connected.
In short I will try to show that a contemplative spirituality may acknowledge
the existence of evil and develop a compassionate response to it without thereby
surrendering the ideal of contemplative detachment. Santayana's ideal of the spiritual
life is thus one, but not the only, possibility that is available, given the initial
premises of his later system.
Santayana describes the quest of the spiritual
life in terms of the radical separation of it from the natural world or "realm
of matter" which forces the animal psyche to live in terms of "values"
such as good and bad, which, in their extreme forms of judgment, may be described
as "absolute good" and "evil." Instead, Santayana offers us
an approach to the realm of essence which can be called a form of liberation insofar
as spirit achieves its complete function without service to the alien needs of
the psyche: intuition pure and simple. The question I wish to probe is the relation
of the moral life to the spiritual, for Santayana certainly sees them not merely
as divergent but in some ways as mutually inhibiting when not kept distinct. Morality,
he claims, pushes spiritual life toward dogmatism, subverting it to the defense
of local ideals instead of allowing spirit to roam free and see things as they
are without concern for their ulterior values for life. In retrieving the classical
doctrine of essence, then, Santayana had to emphasize the rejection of the moral
in the spiritual, lest his view be confounded with Platonism, a doctrine whose
time had come -- and gone, he thought -- with the revolution in modern physics.
The release of spirit into its own domain, into the play of essence, leaves behind
all moral concerns, including the "problem of evil." While moral judgments
may be made about the spiritual life an individual pursues, they are made from
the moral angle, not the spiritual.
Santayana
and Neo-Platonism
There are two interesting essays where the issue came to
occupy Santayana, though they might be regarded as occasional pieces: both were
responses to bungled attempts to handle the topic of "Platonism" --
or, more specifically, Neo-Platonism -- that was so close to Santayana's heart.
One was the 1916 essay "Plotinus and the Nature of Evil" written in
light of B.A.G. Fuller's The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. The second, Platonism
and the Spiritual Life, was composed in 1926 and takes on Dean Inge's The Platonic
Tradition in English Religious Thought.(5) I suspect that this monograph, which
saw the light of day in 1927 along with The Realm of Essence may also have been
written in the afterglow of Santayana's reading of the Fifth Ennead, just published
in McKenna's translation.(6) Santayana paid the highest respect to the Plotinian
system, which, unlike Plato's fundamentally political philosophy, he saw as truly
oriented toward the spiritual life. In a letter from 1919, Santayana defends the
philosophy of Plotinus to Robert Bridges in terms that come quite close to those
of Santayana's own system:
But it seems to me a very great system, very "good
philosophy," and I am glad that the mystics in Oxford are taking him up,
rather than pretending to find comfort in Hegel or in the meretricious psychology
of Bergson. ... Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course
he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering
the good just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this
rendering of moral aspiration is arbitrary, because nature does not really aspire
to anything, each living thing aspires to something different in divergent ways.
But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely
expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is a decidedly
"good philosopher." It is the Byzantine architecture of the mind, just
as good or better than the Gothic. It seems to me better than Christian theology
in this respect, that it isn't mixed up with history, it isn't half Jewish, half
worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology made pure; and that is the
side which seems to be truly spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful.(7)
It
might help us to summarize the Plotinian analysis of the problem of evil as "nothing
positive in itself, only the absence of Good," which has dominated the discussion
of the topic in the west ever since St. Augustine appropriated it for use in Christian
theology. The most famous place this occurs in the Enneads is in the Ninth Treatise
of the Second Book, the essay directed against the Gnostics.(8) The Plotinian
system, recall, finds the one true principle or arch of Being beyond Being itself,
and so beyond Form, making it a simplicity that defies conceptual and linguistic
understanding except as such understanding can turn itself toward its source and
acknowledge its derivative status.(9) From this power, the world of Being "overflows,"
articulating itself into the world of Form and the Divine Nous that eternally
thinks them and, in thinking them, can turn back toward their common source, understanding
the Forms and itself in light of the One. But the activity of direct, contemplative
insight into Form is also productive, generating another "overflow"
into the mimetic order of the cosmos and the living, temporal soul that animates
it. Action, time, body-all are degenerate modes of "contemplation" for
Plotinus.(10) Beyond the rhythmic dance of nature, everlastingly turning about
the One like dancers in a chorus, is the dim and weakened quasi-nothingness of
matter, a mere reception of activity that cannot produce anything further itself.
It is the termination of pure generative power into absolute impotence.
This
is the context in which Plotinus faced the Gnostics, who held that the physical
world was evil, produced by an arrogant and rebellious god in an act of cosmic
hubris (possibly, some speculated, the very figure described in the Hebrew Genesis).
By a saving act of intimate, esoteric knowledge -- gnosis -- the soul could be
delivered to its true home and cease to be afflicted by the body. Such a doctrine
proceeds from a hard moral realism about the sorts of expectations one must face
in our sojourn here in the realm of matter, from the fumbled attempts at order
nature regularly produces and the daily ineptitudes of any given political or
administrative system to the impressive catastrophes of the Black Death or mudslides
that entomb twenty thousand people at once or similar human catastrophes: Huns,
Goths, Mongols, Nazis, the Japanese Imperial Army, and so on. I dwell on this
because, in a certain sense (as Anthony Woodward has noted), Santayana's own view
of nature bears at times rather close resemblance to the Gnostics' bleak view
of nature.(11) Plotinus' response to this view was to say we shouldn't judge a
city by looking only at its worst neighborhoods.(12) If this order is confused,
it nevertheless leads usto recognize it as the image of the higher and more intelligible
good, and, as a rippling reflection in water may turns us toward its source, so
nature can direct us to go beyond itself. But the reflection is not "evil"
for being a reflection, even if it is a troubled reflection. Disciplined reasoning,
says Plotinus, allows us to place the goods and bads of the world in their proper
place and rise above them to the genuine, higher goods.(13) More profoundly, Plotinus
says that to hate the world is to remove oneself from the immanence of the divine
which is at the innermost center of our being. The genuine beauty of the world
lures us to turn toward an inner and higher beauty that leaves the world and its
imperfections behind. The emotion of contempt or hatred utterly fails to make
this inward ascent. As Augustine would say, God is closer to us than we are to
ourselves. Pondus meum, amor meus, he says: my love is my weight.(14) I stress
this point because I believe it is crucial in Santayana's own response to "the
problem of evil." Beauty is not a "solution" to the riddle of the
existence of evil, but a strategy that turns away from the problem itself. The
response to evil, in other words, lies in the discovery of the spiritual life.
The
Spiritual Life as Transcendent of the Problem of Evil
With this in the background,
let us now turn to Santayana's 1916 essay "Plotinus and the Nature of Evil,"
ostensibly a review of Fuller's book on the topic. Fuller saw the problem of evil
on the horns of a dilemma. The alternatives are either naturalism or mysticism.
If one opts for naturalism, Fuller thought, then all values must be equal, for
everything is equally "natural," the saint and the serial murderer and
everyone in between. Each thing is perfect after its own unique kind. The only
alternative, to Fuller at least, was mysticism in which the only good was the
highest reality and anything that separated itself from that good was automatically
evil. The dilemma is summed up by Santayana as "either all excellences are
absolute and incomparable, or there is no excellence but one."(15)
With
reference to the naturalist horn, Santayana argues that to say everything is equally
a phenomenon of nature does not lead to pure moral relativism. Naturalism admits
that the impulses that spring from the live creature may be premoral, but this
is not the same as saying they are all equal, much less morally equal. Some are
more in harmony with their environments than others, and insofar as they are out
of harmony, may generate ideals naturally. As Santayana says, "Hence each
nature originally pronounces itself to be good, but imperfect as it stumbles and
creaks as it goes" (os, 72). Moral values and ideals may have a natural origin
without therefore being branded equal. As living interests become organized, so
goods may be organized in a hierarchy of values. In short, as a naturalist it
may be valuable to have a system of ethics more functional and in touch with the
world than pure relativism allows, though this certainly does not prevent the
naturalist from seeing that several systems are possible or may conflict with
each other. This is more true when we consider values arising from nonhuman organisms.
As Santayana put it, "Had animals spoken, the Inquisition would have had
pretty work on its hands" (os, 70).
This leaves the mystical horn of Fuller's
dilemma. Santayana will not admit the thesis that there is one supreme good means
that everything else falls into some degree of evil, that the levels in the great
chain of Being are but "so many stages of spiritual misery" (os, 70).
One overarching good does not exclude the possibility of subordinate goods. A
good book may have good sentences and each sentence be composed of well-chosen
words written out in perfectly formed letters. Each may be perfect after its kind
and also involved in an overall order of higher and lower degrees of perfection.
It is true, Santayana says, that Plotinus, believing as he did in the potency
of form, reversed the true order of genesis -- his mythology of the overflowing
descent of creative power from beyond the Forms down through nature into the torpid
murk of matter was an inversion of the truth. In nature as we saw there is a natural
heterogeneity of goods. In this way, says Santayana, Plotinus "incidentally
... missed the true explanation of the origin of evil, which lies in the natural
conflict of many powers and many ideals" (os, 75-76).(16) To thrive in nature
we must adopt an organized economy of values so we can move in one direction at
a time, but this does not mean we may not encounter someone else whose internal
economy has set them at cross purposes to ours. Platonism is basically a moral
view that seeks to insist that its analysis of human values achieves a final,
defining insight into the order of things as such, and this is merely presumptuous,
according to Santayana. For such a person, he says, "His Socratic wisdom
in life will become Platonic folly in science" (os, 76). Thus evil, for Santayana,
is simply the partisan word for the inevitable clash of interests in a natural
world that is inherently pluralistic in its aims and not governed by an over-arching,
coordinating good that redeems and saves all things.
Fuller's more fundamental
problem lies behind the sophistic dilemma; it is a failure to understand mysticism
as much as naturalism. The true mystic is not kept from a "hatred of finitude"
simply by a mere inconsistency any more than the naturalist is kept from proclaiming
the equality of every value. Pointing out to the mystic that he adores his supreme
good only because he is separate from it does not lead at all to his condemnation
of himself and everything else distinguished from that good as "evil."
Actual mystics -- not the "classroom idols" of Fuller's paradox -- have
been quite consistent with their principles when they felt "the tenderness
and wonder which filled them in the presence of creation" (os, 77). Though
it is true that the adoration of the mystic implies a separation from the source,
this does not fill him or her with rage at the separation, but with humility and
adoration. The problem, as seen by Plotinus, then, was not the existence of evil;
"it was rather to rise above evil, to decipher a divine image in the worn
and degraded lineaments of things and to save the soul from a temporal and sensuous
life to which evil was native" (os, 78). It may be that when evil cannot
be erased, the natural impulse is to evade it as much as possible, but the root
impulse of Platonism was a love of beauty, passing from lower to higher forms
of it. The problem of evil, says Santayana, is for theologians and apologists
for creator deities or pantheists wishing to assert that all is somehow good.
But
It does not exist for the naturalist because for him both good and evil
are relative to finite interests necessarily at war in this crowded world. Nor
does it exist for the Platonist, to whom it is obvious that the good is far away
and that it was not the good that removed the good where it is absent. The problem
of darkness does not exist for the man gazing at the stars. No doubt the darkness
is there, fundamental, pervasive, and unconquerable except at the pinpoints where
the stars twinkle; but the problem is not why there is such darkness, but what
is the light that breaks through it so remarkably; and granting this light, why
we have eyes to see it and hearts to be gladdened by it. (os 86)
Even though
Platonism is now in abeyance, being an ideal of values now out of fashion, it
may be that "things come round in this world; the ruffians may be upon us
some day when we least expect it and philosophy may have again to retire to the
sanctuary." Santayana concludes with this enigmatic remark: " Even then
we should search the books of Plotinus in vain for any solution to the artificial
problem concerning the existence of evil; but if we searched them for a thread
out of the natural labyrinth of evil, we might possibly find it" (os, 86-87).
Santayana indicates that there may be an important clue for us in the philosophy
of Plotinus, something far different from an sophistical "solution"
to the "problem of evil." Instead of a solution, there is an escape.
But what is this "thread" out of the "natural labyrinth of evil"?
And what is the relationship of Santayana's own later philosophy to this "escape"?
Could Santayana's later philosophy be the naturalistic version of tracing the
Plotinian thread out of the labyrinth, a version purged of Plotinus' moralistic
metaphysics and with its myth of the descending emanation of the supernatural
into nature inverted to become the ascent of spirit from the realm of matter?
Santayana's
Ideal in Platonism and the Spiritual Life
I turn now to Platonism and the Spiritual
Life, written a decade after Santayana's response to Fuller. Santayana scholars
tend to neglect this monograph for some puzzling reason, since I find it one of
the most lucid statements of his thought, something of an enchiridion to the Realms
of Being.(17) Coming as it did after Scepticism and Animal Faith and appearing
simultaneously with The Realm of Essence, it offered at the time an important
link between those opening works in Santayana's mature system and The Realm of
Spirit, the concluding volume of the series, not destined to appear until some
thirteen years later. In other words, at the time of its appearance, Platonism
and the Spiritual Life offered a crucial as well as succinct overview of the spiritual
upshot of Realms of Being. As in the earlier essay on Plotinus, Santayana begins
with a critique of a fumbled interpretation, this time by Dean Inge, who had described
Platonism as "a firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the most real
things in the universe."(18)
As we have seen, "value" for Santayana
refers to something as it stands in contingent relationship to various human desires,
and so does not express at all well the eternal characters of Plato's eid. Plato
was willing to assert the eternal worth of the Forms for the soul because he thought
the nature of the universe relatively fixed and eternal, a fact which we now know
not to be true. Secondly, Plato had conceived his Forms as causes, which for Santayana
was a confession of faith in magic, since their power to make other things behave
derived solely from their inward character of being. The true locus of casual
power he identified with matter, conceived along the lines of a dynamic flux.
However much he respected matter as the only source of existence, Santayana did
not find in it any reassuring endorsement of an "absolute and eternal"
set of values. On the contrary, contingency and conflict, waste and annihilation
abound in nature. Given that death is the one "absolute" the live creature
faces, the realm of matter might well have been that "labyrinth of evil"
Santayana had spoken of earlier.(19) Nevertheless, natural piety insists that
without matter neither animal, psyche nor the embodiment of essence could exist.
Thus the problem of the spiritual life is how is it possible, given that nature
is not fixed and essences are impotent. The failure of Inge's effort to reassert
the contemporary value of Platonism provoked Santayana to explore the permanent
possibility of the spiritual life without it. The essay had in fact begun with
this challenge: "One of the great things past is Platonism, and one of the
great things always possible is the spiritual life" (psl, 1).
Actually,
Santayana does not see Plato as a genuine champion of the spiritual life at all.
He quite correctly describes Plato as from first to last a political thinker.
"To this descendent of Solon," says Santayana, "the universe could
never be anything but a crystal case to hold the jewel of a Greek city" (psl,
27).(20) His metaphysics, according to Santayana, was a sublimated and poetized
mythology reflecting Greek morals. On the other hand, in Plotinus, for whom the
political realm was a gesture and an afterthought, one finds a perfect expression
of what the spiritual life is because it made the act of contemplation, the "flight
of the alone to the Alone," the central theme of its system, to which, as
we have noted, Santayana paid the highest of compliments.(21) As Santayana put
it, the political world for Plotinus was a mere "barnyard" compared
to the fortunes of the soul (psl, 25).
Thus the spiritual life for Plotinus
was not a "compensation" for frustrated political hopes, as it was for
Plato. "Pure spiritual life cannot be something compensatory, a consolation
for having missed more solid satisfactions," comments Santayana, "it
should be rather the flower of all satisfactions, in which satisfaction becomes
free from care, selfless, and wholly actual, and in that inward sense, eternal"
(psl, 29). The underlying drive of Platonic spirituality, ers, is replaced with
the condition of what Santayana calls being "truly emancipated and enlightened"
(psl, 29). The spiritual life is the "disintoxication" from the moral
life, the world of "values," not its sublimated fulfillment, according
to Santayana. The function of pure intelligence becomes "to see such things
as come its way under the form of eternity," which is to say as essences
considered apart from their existence, truth, import or history (psl, 33). Though
spirituality arises from material conditions, including such moral virtues as
"concentration of thought, indifference to fortune and reputation, warmth
of temperament (because spirit cannot burn clear except at high temperature),"
nevertheless "when once aroused, it does not look back in that direction"
(psl, 38). In its purified state, spirit achieves "self-annihilation"
(psl, 40). The spiritual life for Santayana cannot be based on the ultimate fulfilment
of the erotic desire of the good since it aims at the overcoming of all desire
for liberation, that is, enlightenment.
Although Santayana wishes to speak
of the life of spirit in this purely positive sense, in terms of liberation, yet
he is willing to acknowledge two ways in which it can still maintain an orientation
to the world of existence, one by bearing, as it were, the scars of its birth,
and the other involving a selfless and somewhat icy tenderness as it looks down
from its liberated heights. With regard to the first, Santayana gives a somewhat
extraordinary and, I suspect, confessional description. He says:
Were any world
perfect ... its spirit would view it with the same contemplative satisfaction
with which it views any pure essence that spontaneously engages its attention.
It would not, in respect to that perfect world, be harassed by remorse, as it
must be in an imperfect world where it counts the cost of existence and considers
the dreadful sufferings which plagued it like a nightmare, before something beautiful
and good could appear for even a moment. I say remorse because such is the feeling
that comes over me when I remember the travail in which, at least in man, the
spirit has had to endure in bringing its better life to birth: but the spirit
itself has no guilt in the matter; it was caught in a vice; and it may overlook
that terrible gestation when at last it reaches the open and rewards itself with
an hour of freedom and gladness. (psl, 51)
As in the earlier essay on Plotinus,
Santayana insists that the aim of spirit is not to rebuke the world for the darkness
in it, but to gaze instead at the stars. The Gnostic who condemns the world as
evil and who dwells upon that fact has merely transported the moral distractions
of existence into the world of spirit, thereby spoiling its own natural radiance
and joy with a halo of sadness and recrimination that could -- and should -- have
been left behind.
The other response of spirit when it has achieved detachment
is not blank indifference, but "joy" in anything when approached in
"simplicity," that is, without any "ulterior interest."
...
in other words, purity comes from detaching the thing seen and loved from the
world that besets and threatens it and attaching it to the spirit to which it
is an eternal possession. But this thing eternally possessed is not the thing
as the world knows and prizes it; it is not the person, nation, or religion as
it asserts and flaunts itself, in a mortal anxiety to be dominant; it is only
that thing in its eternal essence, out of which the stress and doubt of existence
have wholly passed. It is that thing dead, immortal, its soul restored, as Plotinus
would have said, to the soul of the universe where, together with all other souls,
it has always been contained in its purity and perfection. But the truth of it
there is not the fact of it here; and therefore the world, though the spirit loves
it far more truly and tenderly than it loves itself, is chilled and rebuked by
that look of divine love, which, if it were heeded, would transmute its whole
life and change it from what it so passionately and cruelly is, in time, into
that which the spirit sees it to be in eternity. (psl, 53-54)(22)
Thus the
joy and tenderness with which spirit sees the world are due to spirit's ability
to see the things of the world purely, as essences, and not as the mortal, suffering
beings they are, caught up in the turbid flood of existence. Spirit apprehends
things in the light of its own actuality: "awareness, intelligence, reconciliation"
(psl, 56). It welcomes the essences that come its way without hunger or desire
or with the sense that better views are to be had elsewhere. As Dante's Picardia
says in her eternal place in the lowly lunar heaven, "There is no envy in
these spheres" (psl, 75).(23)
Thus Santayana offers us a naturalistic
mysticism, a "way out of the labyrinth of evil" that releases spirit
to its free home, the infinite wilderness of essence where things may be selflessly
possessed in their eternity and immediacy. Mysticism, Santayana observes, means
silence because it involves "the negation of every human wish and idea"
(psl, 77). Names still carry "animal faith" with them, and so any discourse
about "essence" may permit it to be overheard as a "temporal fact";
"Silence is therefore imperative, if the mystic has any conscience"
(psl, 78). The only danger is that the mystic confuses his ecstasy for a higher
reality or makes ecstasy itself his object. The first is a mistake in truth and
the second in substitution of essence for the will, which must be renounced to
be transcended. In renouncing words, Santayana says, we know them as symbols only;
the straight but difficult way, in the words of San Juan de la Cruz is "Nothing,
Nothing, Nothing" (psl, 81). Spirit is nothing and empties itself into nothing.
The discipline of the spiritual life is "disillusion," a term Santayana
had used from the very beginning of his philosophical development.(24) Positively,
this means that we experience the world as much as possible with the sense of
"the ultimate in the immediate" (psl, 83). Anxiety must be effectively
banished, initially by all pragmatic means to achieve a temporary island of relative
stability in the flux of existence, and ultimately by the concentration of spirit
apart from the urgencies and anguishes of the animal host. Thus morality actually
presents a serious danger to Santayana insofar as it may interject its "distractions"
into the spiritual life -- the heaven of Christianity, did it exist, might effectively
choke the life of spirit with its perfect and pervasive moral industriousness.
In other words, in a world where the Good and the Beautiful perfectly combine
everywhere, it is far more likely that the Beautiful will be eclipsed by the Good
and remain unseen for what it is. Romantic pantheism presents a similar problem,
infected as it is with a subliminal need to moralize beauty. Wordsworth, for example,
could not effectively free his spirit, struggling as it did "to wash the
world white and clean, adopt it and set it up for a respectable person" (psl,
85). But, says Santayana, "The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented,
confused, deluded for ever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with
glints of courage and laughter; and in these the spirit blooms timidly and struggles
to the light among the thorns" (psl, 85). Wordsworth's problem was that he
could not banish the world and "Nothing is able to banish the world except
contempt for the world, and this was not in him" (psl, 85).
This then
is Santayana's challenge: the condition of the spiritual life is to leave moral
concerns behind; if the world is held in the light, it is the in cold light of
the emptiness of essence under the sky of eternity. But Santayana's discipline
of liberation, like its Plotinian model, is a discipline of ascent. The irony,
of course, is that Santayana has utterly rejected any Platonic metaphysics that
would make this ascent one toward reality. His "ascent" is a flight
that takes off from terra firma (or rather, given his view of matter, terra infirma)
and must return to it. Indeed, it never really leaves the ground. It is more of
a shift of attention away from the path before us toward the stars above. Like
that of Plotinus, Santayana's askesis requires perfection of inward concentration
that ends in ecstatic union where simplicity of vision coincides perfectly with
the simplicity of its object. But that is where Santayana's discussions leave
us, both in the breviary of Platonism and the Spiritual Life and the conclusion
of The Realm of Spirit.
The
Descent of Spirit and Santayana's Dilemma
The trouble with the mystic ascent,
however, is that the ladder is never really pulled up. There is the descent, the
reawakening. This troubled Plotinus deeply. "Many times it has happened,"
he says, "lifted out of the body into myself, becoming external to all other
things and self-encentered, beholding a marvelous beauty ... yet there comes the
moment of descent ... I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending..."(25)
For Santayana this is no more than the trough of the wave which we ride through
until the next crest, and our moral concerns are those of keeping afloat and navigating
the waters as best we may. The moral life is not abandoned at all, merely temporarily
bracketed in precious moments of illumination. And it may be any kind of moral
life, though Santayana recommends one that lives with piety toward the real natural
harmonies that can exist between the rhythms of nature and our own bodies. Still,
in the end, the moral life and the spiritual life have little to say to each other:
the spiritual life offers itself to the moral life as a potentially welcome distraction;
the moral life threatens to disturb the spiritual life, even while making it possible
in the first place. The more the two are brought into harmony, it seems, the greater
the danger that the spiritual life will become confused with the moral life --
with "Platonism" being the unhappy result.
Is this a necessary conclusion?
Or has Santayana presented us with something akin to Fuller's dilemma, that is,
a false dilemma based upon extremes that are artificial abstractions? First, Santayana
does not claim that the spiritual life has an absolute demand upon all of us.
There are a plurality of values for living beings and what he has to say about
the spiritual life only has bearing upon those for whom this has a positive value
in the first place. Others may be perfectly happy wandering the "labyrinth"
without concern for an escape. While his moral and political writings may speak
to those individuals, Santayana recognizes that his ulterior philosophy of the
spiritual life is not addressed to them at all. He is a contemplative speaking
to contemplatives. In this dialogue, however, there may be a response that diverges
from Santayana's own conclusions without violating the premises.
Second, there
is some difficulty with the opposition between these two lives Santayana presents.
There is something unsettling in the attempt to deal with the reality of evil
(not the conceptual "problem of evil") by relegating it to the inherent
plurality of values the natural world spawns and offering an aesthetic alternative
that, from its own perspective, is value-neutral. Must an aesthetic attitude toward
the world be forced to choose between the view that art's sole function is to
serve morality or be limited to focus on pure form regardless of content? To use
an example, Goya's Third of May, 1808, which shows Spanish patriots being executed
by a French firing squad, or Picasso's Guernica, also a protest against the horrors
of war, can both be viewed in the gallery in terms of their "pure form,"
that is, in terms of their rhythm, balance, color, use of space and so on. And
one school of aesthetics would say this is really what constitutes them as "art,"
whatever their content may refer to. But a richer aesthetics would say that these
works evoke through their aesthetic form the clarified meaning of the evils they
portray, a clarification that may not have been lucidly present even to those
who suffered the events directly. If one beheld a Greek tragedy while remaining
oblivious to the moral content of the play, one would miss the meaning of the
aesthetic experience.(26) The evocation of these meanings enables us to engage
in a contemplative response to the world in all its aspects, including the moral.
In other words, the aesthetic attitude can contemplate an "essence"
as a meaning that has been purified or clarified via catharsis. And this may result
in our ability to exist in the world itself with an enhanced understanding and
vision of things. In other words, one of the aims of contemplative liberation
may be to teach us a way of wisdom, an enlightened way of life, that is thoroughly
integrated, not tangential to, daily moral practice. The question that needs to
be posed to Santayana is: Given the presuppositions of his ontology, can there
be a method of liberation that offers a more inclusive response to the moral life
and the nature of the existence of the natural world than the one Santayana himself
offered? Can the spiritual life be directed toward a compassionate, mindful awareness
of the world without thereby developing a moralism antithetical to the spiritual
life?
The Buddhist Ideal of
Compassionate Insight
The Buddhist tradition may offer an important example
for Santayana's philosophy, sharing as it does a similar view of the physical
world as a turbid flux of "dependent co-arising" or "inter-being"
(pratitya-samutpada) which is fundamentally "empty" (unya) and so pervaded
with transitory instability, anxiety, and suffering (dukkha).(27) Buddhism does
not take a Gnostic view of the world as inherently "evil," though at
times it can dramatize its negative aspects rather excessively.(28) Nevertheless,
the proper pragmatic Buddhist response is: If the world is like this, then what
can we do about it? Like Santayana, Buddhist philosophy sees an intelligent or
"awakened" (bodhi) response to the nature of existence which aims at
liberation by clarity of insight (prajña) into the fundamentals (or dharmas)
and their behavior.(29) A great deal of attention is paid in Buddhist practice
to training the mind to see beyond the apparent substantiality of ordinary experience
and recognizing how objects and "self" arise functionally as products
of change, desire, and inherited causal dispositions (karma).(30) With enough
skill, this can effect the dissipation of desire born of illusion, the frantic
"thirst" or "grasping" after things (tanha) that gives rise
to the existential "problem of evil," the reality of suffering. Not
only does this dispel any false notion of the substantial self-identity of "objects,"
which are ways of designating events (even the elements or dharmas of the world
are "empty," unya, said Nagarjuna), but the self-identity of "essences,"
even of the non-existential sort like Santayana's, suffers the same fate.(31)
In other words, the critique of a Buddhist philosopher like Nagarjuna would be
that to assert the non-existential identity of essences is still due to a degree
of "attachment" or grasping, and when this is given up the essence is
neither identical nor non-identical and can be penetrated with an act of liberating
insight (prajña). When all things can be seen in their emptiness, their
clear but momentary "suchness" (tathata), then nirvana and samsara coincide.(32)
Liberation is not a rejection of the world for the sake of some transcendent "there."
Nirvana is not a "place" (as if fire went "somewhere" when
it was put out) but a "way"; not a "what" but a "how."
How does one behold the world and respond to it when one has "passed through"
the empty nature of desire?
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,"
says the Heart Sutra, but this insight does not terminate in pessimism, fatalism,
scepticism or nihilism.(33) Rather, it leads to "tranquility" or the
extinction of dukkha (i.e., "nirvana") which is also positively described
at times as "bliss" (ananda), a condition that also involves the response
of compassion (karuna) for all sentient beings, at least in the later Mahayana
traditions stemming from the Prajñaparamita literature.(34) Buddhism does
not seek to turn away from this world to another, better one. Rather, it is concerned
with a careful way of "handling" this world without getting burned by
it. In this approach contemplative insight and practical action are not opposed
by mutually sustaining. The Buddha himself presented the Eightfold Path precisely
as a "skilful way" of passing through this world, a moral discipline
that was fundamentally connected with the spiritual life. The eight parts of the
path are classified in three main groups. One consists of three virtues of right
conduct: kindness and moderation in (1) speech, (2) actions and (3) livelihood.
Another includes three virtues of right mental discipline: (4) building habits
of endeavor, (5) clarity of awareness, and (6) meditative concentration. The last
has two virtues of right wisdom: (7) intelligent understanding and (8) "right
thought." All work together, as the eight spokes of a wheel, to keep it moving
smoothly.(35) But it is this last, "right thought," that I will briefly
describe because it offers, I believe, a significant alternative to the severe
antimoralism of Santayana's conception of the spiritual life while still accepting
most of his analysis of the nature of existence. It shows us a "contemplative
ethics of compassion" that does not fall into Santayana's conception of the
moral life as a "distraction" to the spiritual life.
Right thought
(samm sankappa) is included with right understanding (samm ditthi) as a necessary
aspect of the nature of wisdom. "Right understanding" involves deep
insight into the true nature of the world, especially with respect to the problem
of suffering -- the "labyrinth of evil," as Santayana would say. It
is a strictly cognitive ability. "Right thought," however, is a discipline
that works on meditative beholding suffering beings with compassion. It is not
easy to say that this is a moral or aesthetic or emotional ability more than a
"cognitive" one, since it also involves insight into the true nature
of things. But it focuses upon those aspects of the world that help us attain
compassionate awareness. It is an integral part of the nature of wisdom to cultivate
benevolent selfless love (metta) with respect to all beings and compassion (karuna)
for all that are suffering. Buddhism believes that our daily actions, including
those that are called "moral," spring from the sorts of beliefs we have
which in turn generate desires which create the "objects" to which we
become attached (including the "object" of the self). Attention to our
basic beliefs and a clear understanding of how they constitute the objects of
our world -- and so of our lives -- is a central concern for Buddhism. As Walpola
Ruhala says, "All thoughts of selfish desire, ill-will, hatred, and violence
are the result of lack of wisdom -- in all spheres of life, whether individual,
social or political."(36) The way to overcome dukkha is to develop insights
and daily habits that generate actions that do not lead to grasping, violence,
and so to more suffering. All eight parts of the Eightfold Path cooperate and
mutually sustain each other. Contemplation and practice work together to generate
a life that is "liberated." And this may be contrasted to Santayana's
philosophy which tends to keep the spiritual and moral lives disjointed or, at
best, irrelevant to each other.
The Buddhist discipline of right thought in
particular might reveal a more functional connection between these two ends and
so exhibit an alternative to Santayana's response to "the labyrinth of evil."
Right understanding involves daily attentiveness to features of the world that
might awaken the negative passions of grasping or hatred and beholding them instead
with gentle but egoless benevolence attended by penetratingly clear understanding
into their fundamental nature. It involves daily meditation practices that develop
methods of beholding other beings so that feelings of benevolence and compassion
are at the forefront of consciousness.(37) By contemplating others compassionately,
one is not only more disposed to act in a compassionate manner toward them but
in a way that evokes the ability of others to seek compassionate, liberated wisdom.
For example, a great deal of obscurity of perception can arise from conscious
or unconscious fears we may have toward things. Beholding those things as "essences"
not only allows us to see them more clearly but to transcend our fear of them.
Compassion or metta means seeing things as they truly are; this can only be done
when the spirit is at peace. Another example is the meditation practice that seeks
to cultivate enduring states of benevolent compassion by developing habits that
focus on remembering acts of benevolence one has done or which have been done
to one, gradually extending these thoughts outward toward recollection of acts
of benevolence others have done to others and so on. By so doing, one comes to
focus one's conscious thoughts regularly on being well-disposed to others in the
world.(38) As the Mahayana sages say, all beings are potentially the Buddha.(39)
The path towards that goal of compassionate freedom lies in cultivating habits
of "paying attention."(40)
To put these ideas into more Santayanan
terms, the Realm of Essence may be constituted of an infinite number of essences,
any of which may offer themselves to spirit as an object of contemplation. But
some of those essences may be conducive toward leading a lift of compassionate
benevolence while others may be conducive toward quite the opposite sort of actions.
That is, there are a number of essences relating to aspects of compassion, and
by disciplining ourselves to focus on these as they might be instantiated in the
realm of existence, we can develop a mode of conduct that is at once "ethical"
without involving "distraction" from the spiritual life. Indeed, by
concentrating on such essences one might develop a mode of life that was even
more highly conducive to the spiritual life than the one offered by Santayana
himself, which suffers from a fluctuation between acting in the existential, moral
life and intermittently escaping into the realm of spirit for its "hour of
gladness." The sorts of essences spirit contemplates do not have equally
neutral consequences for our existential psychic life, and the concern which essences
might be contemplated is not merely a question for the animal psyche, but for
spirit as well. In particular, a life that is in harmony with spirit's ideal of
liberation and persistently conducive to it, should be preferred by both the psyche
and spirit over those lives in which the two do not sustain each other or, worse,
in which spirit and psyche inhibit each other and are at best disconnected. In
this sense, the Buddhist life of contemplative compassion offers a significant
alternative to Santayana's conception of the spiritual life without fundamentally
altering the premises from which Santayana's later philosophy sets out.(41)
I
offer this as an example only -- that we may see that there is more connection
between the spiritual and the moral life than Santayana was willing to grant.
Santayana thought of the moral life in western terms, as a struggle of will, and
so an effort reaching toward an end, rather than as a shadow that follows us because
we have turned toward the light. In concluding, I will reaffirm that I think what
Santayana has offered the future is an exemplary conception of philosophy in service
to the spiritual life. His own rendition of this philosophy bears understandably
the scars of its birth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which
saw the shattering of so many ideals and comforting illusions. No doubt it also
bears the scars of its "terrible gestation" in Santayana's own life,
which he only obliquely acknowledges. But I do not think that we need to dismiss
the moral life from the spiritual or to condemn its presence in spirit as regrettable
"remorse" tainting the otherwise happy intuition of essence. Compassion
and benevolence are part of the wisdom of spirit, if handled properly. As the
Japanese poet Issa said on the death of his child,
This
world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet ... .
THOMAS
ALEXANDER
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
NOTES
1.
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Santayana Society at its
annual meeting in Boston on December 28, 1999.
2. Along with Thomas Merton,
a theologian rather than a philosopher.
3. William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (Harvard, 1985), p. 332.
4. I find that my comments in
this essay have unintentionally inserted themselves into a previous discussion
carried on between my old teacher Paul Kuntz and Herman Saatkamp. (See Overheard
in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society No. 3, 1985, and No. 10, 1992.)
In his initial article, "Santayana's Neo-Platonism," Kuntz argued that
Santayana's Realms of Being implied not only a spiritual ascent but an ontological
order corresponding to it, one that was Christian as well as Neo-Platonic. While
acknowledging Santayana's use of the imagery of the spiritual ascent, Saatkamp
did not find this to lead to any deep commitment to anything beyond a naturalism
that accepts a plurality of goods, only one of which might be the "life of
spirit." Kuntz's reply, "The Ascent of Spirit: Is Santayana's System
a Naturalistic Neo-Platonic Hierarchy" (1992), persisted with the original
argument, focusing on a detailed exegesis of Platonism and the Spiritual Life
(a key text for my essay as well). While I agree, as does Saatkamp, that Kuntz
has commendably drawn attention to the Neo-Platonic (and Indian) influences in
Santayana's mature philosophy, which have tended to be neglected by those stressing
Santayana's naturalism, I also agree with Saatkamp that Kuntz has pushed the argument
a step too far and is in danger of ignoring the explicit role of contingency and
plurality as the basis for any sort of life, spiritual or otherwise. In short,
Kuntz tries to move Santayana's ideal of the spiritual life from being the expression
of one of the many contingent values in nature (one that Santayana himself valued)
to one everyone ought to adopt because nature herself recommends it, thereby transforming
Santayana's ontology into a moralistic metaphysics. This move is explicitly rejected
by Santayana. For an attempt to present a much more Aristotelian idea of a spiritual
life, a practical rather than contemplative ideal grounded in Santayana's The
Life of Reason, see the recent essay by yet another former teacher of mine, James
Gouinlock's "Ultimate Religion," Overheard in Seville, Vol. 12 (1998).
5. In fact it may have also been settling a score dating back to 1918 when
Santayana had written in the margin of Inge's The Philosophy of Plotinus "The
motley eloquence of the pulpit, the lazy [line?] of a rhetorician and moralist
who wants to talk about the world without studying it." Cited in John McCormick,
George Santayana: A Biography (Knopf, 1987), p. 268.
6. McKenna's beautiful,
if eccentric, multi-volume translation of the Enneads began in 1917 with Ennead
I (along with other extracts), and continued with a second volume in 1921 (consisting
of Enneads III and II in that order), with a third in 1924 (Ennead IV). The final
volume with the sixth Ennead was published in 1930. But my suspicion is as yet
unverified.
7. Santayana to Robert Bridges of Sept. 18, 1919 in The Letters
of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1955),
p. 178. In this letter Santayana does comment on reading the first volume of McKenna's
translation just then published.
8. Recent scholarship has actually determined
that this is but the last third of a much longer treatise cut up and distributed
throughout the Enneads by Plotinus' editor, Porphyry. The full treatise consists
of Enneads III. 8, V.5, and II.9. When read together in proper sequence the work
ranks, in my view, with one of the greatest philosophical documents from antiquity.
See the discussion by A. H. Armstrong at II.9 in his edition and translation of
the Enneads (Loeb Classical Library).
9. The whole philosophy of Plotinus
develops the logical consequences of Plato's sketchy and somewhat embarrassed
treatment of the Good as "the Form of Forms" at Republic 509 c, which
describes it as "transcending Being in dignity and power,"a comment
that provokes laughter from Glaucon and Adeimantus. As the arch of Form, Plotinus
observed, the One cannot be a Form and so is form-less and as the principle of
Being cannot be said to "be" at all. Logos fails, though Plotinus is
willing to describe the One as "limitless power" as well as pure simplicity.
As "one" it is not at all a "numerical unity," something both
conceptual and abstract.
10. "Contemplation" is the poor English
word used for the Greek therein (). This word rejects any notion discursive process
or muddled drifting, which our word "contemplation" drags in. It involves
the idea of rapt, penetrating comprehension in which the truth, order and beauty
of something are fused together forever timelessly and made entirely lucid.
11.
See Anthony Woodward, Living in the Eternal (Vanderbilt, 1988), pp. 108-109, 111-113.
What offsets his tendency toward the gnostic view of the world, of course is Santayana's
equally hard-headed rejection of magic and supernaturalism, leaving him with a
more realistic and occasionally genial expression of "natrual piety"
toward the Realm of Matter. Nevertheless, he did find idealism of any sort insufferably
tender-minded.
12. En. II.9.7
13. A constant criticism in Ennead II.9
is that the Gnostics are half-literate, irrational, pompous and histrionic (the
ancient world apparently had its fundamentalists). He says, "The rest of
their teachings I leave you to investigate by reading their books and to observe
throughout the kind of philosophy which we pursue, besides all its other excellences,
displays simplicity and straightforwardness of character along with clear thinking,
and aims at dignity, not rash arrogance, and combines confident boldness with
reason and much safeguarding and caution and a great deal of circumspection: you
are to use philosophy of this kind as a standard of comparison for the rest."
(Armstrong)
14. Confessions XIII.9. The role of beauty in salvation is the
key theme of Ennead I.6, one of the first and most influential of the Enneads
read by Augustine. The idea of one's love being one's "weight" (or the
natural place toward which one tends) is the guiding theme of Dante's Comedia:
the souls exist in the manifested world of their genuine loves, from lowest to
highest.
15. Obiter Scripta, p. 71. Hereafter cited as os.
16. Compare
Platonism and the Spiritual Life where he says, "Evil can arise only within
each world when it becomes faithless to some Idea which it has begun to pursue
or is crossed in it by some external enemy (if any) or by the inward contradiction
and complexity of its own impulses" (p. 44). To judge the world as "evil"
requires those very animal interests and concerns that are condemned in the act
of judgment -- "these feelings are part of the world which they condemn."
Hence to turn from the moral world is to turn from such judgments altogether.
17. At least see John McCormick's rather dismissive remarks in his George
Santayana" A Biography, p. 268. For Platonism and the Spiritual Life as an
enchiridion or "handbook" of Santayana's later philosophy see my article
"Santayana's Sage: The Disciplines of Aesthetic Enlightenment," Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXXIII, No. 2, p. 332 f. By describing the work
as an enchiridon, I am not only thinking of its similarity to the "handbooks"
of Epictetus, Augustine, and Erasmus, but of other short, major summaries of a
philosopher's thought such as Spinoza's Treatise on the Improvement of the Mind
or Leibniz's Monadology.
18. Quoted in Platonism and the Spiritual Life, p.
2. Hereafter cited in the text as psl.
19. In fact in this essay he describes
it as "barbarous and in indefinite flux" (psl, 33).
20. For those
who insist on thinking of Plato as primarily a metaphysician, some attention should
be given to the likelihood that the tetrology beginning with Timaeus was broken
off in mid-sentence in its second work, Critias, so that Plato could undertake
his longest work, Laws.
21. Ennead VI.9.11, the famous conclusion of the Enneads.
Santayana says, "In the unclouded, synthetic believing mind of Plotinus,
this chastened mythology [i.e. Plato's] crystalized into the most beautiful of
systems" (psl, 23, italics added). This is no idle compliment.
22. Santayana's
stress of the words "here" and "there" is an echo of Plotinian
language, "here" being the world of nature and "there" ()
being the divine world of Nous contemplating the Forms. Compare psl, p. 64 and
refer to the full text of the letter to Robert Bridges cited above.
23. Paradiso
III. This is the sphere of those who, though dedicated to a life of worship, have
had to break their vows and return to worldly life, hence the significance of
the mottled discoloration of the moon reflects their lives of "blended virtues."
After speaking, Picardia recedes singing, "vanishing like a heavy thing downward
in deep water" (123).
24. See "A Religion of Disillusion" in
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and the much later, crucial essay "Ultimate
Religion" in Obiter Scripta.
25. Ennead IV.8.1. McKenna translation.
26. The idea that art allows us to look at the "clarified meaning"
of events that otherwise may remain dark is what I take to be the best understanding
of the term katharsis, whatever Aristotle himself may have intended. Art, like
tragedy, gives us emotional as well as intellectual clarification of meaning and
value. The contrast between Santayana's formalist aesthetics and Dewey's aesthetics
that integrates form and content is the theme of my essay, "Santayana's Unbearable
Lightness of Being," Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society
11 (1993).
27. Though dukkha can often carry the primary sense of "suffering,"
it can also mean "instability" and "impermanence." Thus the
experience of happiness or joy, though certainly not "sorrowful" or
painful at the time is nevertheless dukkha when understood clearly.
28. The
Buddha's famous "Fire Sermon" being one noted example of this tendency.
29. Dharma has a wide range of meanings (comparble to those of the Greek term
logos): its core meaning is "that which upholds," and so is extended
to "laws" or moral customs which uphold society, the laws of the universe,
the basic elements of the universe, the elements of self, the expression of those
laws in teachings, and specifically the teachings of the Buddha.
30. This
part of Buddhist teaching is called "Abidharma."
31. Nagarjuna (ca.
150 CE) was one of the main philosophical exponents of the Mahayana school known
as "the Middle Way" or Madhyamika. By insisting on the emptiness of
the dharmas (taken in whatever sense), Nagarjuna moved Buddhist philosophy from
the dogmatic factionalism into which it had lapsed back to its original therapeutic
mission. See Frederick Streng's fine study, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning.
32. Samsara is the "wheel" of existence of ordinary life lived in
ignorance, and so subject to the demands of causality and grasping -- the "Realm
of Matter" in Santayana's terminology as experienced by biological organisms.
Santayana puts all morality into this sphere. By showing that nirvana, the realm
of liberated insight (Santayana's Realm of Spirit) is "empty" and so
nowhere, it is nothing else than the world, but experienced in terms of its emptiness
and so freed of its existential power. Indeed, the liberating nature of insight
(prajña) is that the world stands out far more clearly than before.
33.
The Heart Sutra is a short but central Mahayana text containing a synopsis of
the prajñaparamita teaching. "Form" (rupa) is actually more what
we would call "substance" or even "body." See Buddhist Texts
Through the Ages, ed. Edward Conze (Philosophical Library, 1954), pp. 152-53 and
Conze's commentary in Buddhist Wisdom Texts.
34. These texts were the product
of various thinkers in India between 200 BCE and 400CE. They are critical of the
earlier ideal of the enlightened sage (arhat) who simply rejects the world for
his own salvation and put forward the new ideal of the "awakened being of
compassion," the bodhisattva, who turns toward the suffering beings of the
world with enlightened understanding.
35. For a discussion of the Eightfold
Path, here summarized, see Walpola Ruhala, What the Buddha Taught, 2nd edition
(Grove Press, 1974), Ch. V.
36. What the Buddha Taught, p. 49.
37. Metta
or benevolence is the first of the four "brahma-viharas" or "sacred
houses" of karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy), and upekha (equinimity),
these latter growing out of the cultivation of the first.
38. Compare Dante's
purification before entering the Garden of Eden at the end of Purgatario: he bathes
in the river of Lethe to forget his sins and then in the river of Eunoë to
remember all the good deeds he did and which were done to him. (Purgartario XXVIII,
XXXI).
39. To explore how this is carried out in practice, see Sharon Salzberg's
Loving-Kindness (Shambala Publications, 1995). Salzberg is an acclaimed American
Buddhist teacher specializing in this particular form of meditation practice.
40. Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness, p.192.
41. In this sense, James Gouinlock's
attempt to present a conception of the spiritual life based on the more Aristotelian
views of Santayana's Life of Reason -- and those of Aristotle himself -- does
not present the strong counter-example to Santayana's later philosophy that Buddhism
does, in my view, because it introduces a sense of naturalistic teleology that
the later Santayana clearly abjures.