To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 10, 1933
I have now read Loisy’s little book. As you would suppose I agree with him in his criticism of Bergson; but I was disappointed in his own positive position—quite irreligious—to the effect that Humanity is the true God and the League of Nations his holy temple. It is the old French Comtist positivism, and hardly expected after Loisy’s demonstration of insight into Greek mysteries and St. Paul. In contrast, I revert with more sympathy to the Deux Sources. After all there is a mystical religion which is not an enlarged selfishness, as is the religion of humanity: you may remember what Benda says about this. Only it is not Bergson’s dynamic biological Messianism: it is something Platonic, poetic, ascetic, and ultra-human. The mystics are influential, and may even revolutionize society (without perhaps improving it in the end) but that is precisely because repentance, like falling in love, can liberate mankind from old worldly habits and introduce, in the next age, a fresh naiveté and greenness into life. This renewal is not due to the mysticism directly, since mysticism is merely negative from the worldly point of view: but it may follow the decay of an out-worn civilization, as a new Spring naturally follows winter.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY