Category: LETTERS Page 3 of 274

To Augusto Guzzo
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, May 5, 1948

According to Catholic dogma, in Christ himself, in Jesus, God existed as in no other man. But I am not discussing that doctrine, but only the teaching of the Gospel (especially in John) that God and Christ himself will come to dwell within others, Christ’s disciples. Here it is evident that God and Christ are forms of thought and with which may be infused into other spirits. God is an ideal in them; whether he exists also hypostatically in himself, is a question of fact, objective information conveyed by faith and dogma, not a question of the complexion of spiritual life in a man when he or others say that God is dwelling in him.

…When I say that Christ, being God, can reflect the whole divine nature, I am talking of the idea of Christ as conceived by Christian faith. I think that a myth: what I think real is the ideal and partial presence of divine will and knowledge and love in human beings.

What you mean by “God humanised” is not clear to me. The divine nature in Christ, according to Christian faith, was not humanised: it remained simply divine. But it was conjoined with a human psyche, so that the latter became sacred, utterly united in intent, by faith and love, to the divine nature, yet preserving the temporal, successive, limited experience proper to a human being. And I should add, proper to existence itself. For the life of God in eternity is an idea only: it has moral reality, but does not designate an actual fulfilled existence. But this is an endless subject.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown

To George Sturgis
Grand Hotel
Rome, May 4, 1941

Yesterday I went to the Credito Italiano and received lire 12,600 and odd, which with what I had on hand gives me ample funds for two months more in Italy in any case, counting doctors’ bills, and possible journey to the frontier. This in case communication with the U.S. should be interrupted before you send me the next draft. I asked the now amiable gent at the Credito Italiano whether he thought the interruption was likely to occur, and he said no: that it would not be in the American interest. But people so seldom do what is for their own interest that I am not at all confident, and wish to be prepared for the worst. If all goes well until June 15 and you then send me $1000, I shall be all right until October at least; so that I should be able to spend a peaceful summer writing my amusing Autobiography—amusing at least to myself.

I am now practically well, except for a gouty knee that keeps me from taking long walks; but I can walk well enough for short distances, and take a cab when I wish to go farther. Cory has sent me Russell’s new book, which I am now reading with interest; and I can always fall back on the classics, Latin or Italian, which are to be had here; but being cut off from current books in French, particularly, is the most disagreeable effect, for me, of the present restrictions. Those in food do no harm: although beef, veal, and pork are limited to two days a week now, we can still have mutton, chicken, ginea fowl, partriges, tongue, liver, sweetbreads, and fish at all times—enough for an abstemious philosopher.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.

Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6 
Rome, May 3, 1946

Dear Rosamond:
Another box has arrived from you—you are indefatigable—with a jar of apricot jam and a large fruit-cake. In the bottom was a newspaper—the Crimson, I supposed, with Bob’s articles: but no: it looked rather crumpled and the title was The Christian Register. What a disappointment! Perhaps the Crimson will come next time. I don’t understand what it can mean to register Christianity. What Christians are expected to register is their sins, or if they are very old-fashioned, their miracles; and I can’t imagine a Boston publication registering either. Besides, I have been busy of late, in my own way, about Christianity, and I am afraid it has been too much for me at my years, for I have discovered in my book on The Idea of Christ the almost exact repetition on page 247 of three and a half lines from page 244, where they belong. How did this happen? And why didn’t the proof-readers, who included Mr. Wheelock of Scribner’s, Cory, and I, never notice it? Or did they think it was intentional? It was simple witlessness and fatigued attention in my case: it would be a good joke if anyone took it for a burst of eloquence. You know Demosthenes said three things were essential to the orator: repetition, repetition, and repetition. It may be essential to oratory, but it is also found in the talk of old fools.

We have had the much needed rain, and with May summer weather is upon us. I feel well, and encouraged about my book on politics, for which I have invented—ex post facto—a logical arrangement: 4 b/Books or Parts: 1, Preliminaries (which is almost complete), 2, The Generative Order of Society, or The Order of Growth, 3, The Militant Order, and 4, the Rational Order. Under these heads I am going to distribute so much of the stuff, accumulated for thirty years, as seems worth preserving, adding what I have learned since or am learning (from Stalin and Collingwood) that may bring the subject up to date. I don’t expect to live to finish this work, but that doesn’t matter. It will keep me occupied, innocently for the rest of my days.

Yours affly GSantayana

P.S. If you have any photos of yourself or the boys, I should like to have them very much.

 From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Curt John Ducasse
Rome, May 2, ’25

Thank you very much for your two articles. I agree with the thesis of the one on Teleology; a movement culminating in some interesting phase must be either a result of various automatisms or an instance of automatism. Mechanism, if we value the issue, may always be called teleology. The teleology that is impossible is only that which represents the result as a cause. As to your Liberalism in Ethics, although I agree with every part of the argument, I feel some dissatisfaction with the general conclusion. You seem to leave out the authority of a man’s own nature over his casual preferences, in other words, self-knowledge. I entirely agree that different natures have no moral authority over one another; but folly in judgement and action is nevertheless possible if a creature ignores the interests or the facts which he would wish to take into account if he remembered them.

G. Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence RI

To Paul Arthur Schilpp
Hotel Danieli
Venice. May 1, 1940

People who are much younger naturally don’t know how unlike the present the intellectual world was fifty years ago, when I wrote my verses. For instance, I had hardly heard of the “metaphysical” poets, and have not read them even now, except in quotations here and there. Rice is perfectly right in his conclusion that when my mind became poetical, I ceased to write in verse. My verse was youthful effusion, not art. Latin facility, not depth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale