Our Santayana

Ancient Gnosticism, whether pagan or heretically Christian, was frankly magical in its depiction of the spirit's imprisonment in a lower world of matter ruled by demonic powers. In its flourishing mythological accretions of aeons and demons and angels between that lower world and the transcendent brightness of an invisible God of pure light, it was far removed from the firmly naturalistic outlook of Santayana. The phantastic cosmological speculations of Hinduism were alien to him as well, and he specifically detached himself from any such superstitious extravagance. Steady retention of a naturalistic base reminds us that Santayana managed in his later writings to sustain by poetical ph[r]asing, and at times virtual self-contradiction, an intensely felt paradox: redemptive spirituality within the framework of an intransigently monistic materialism. All real causal efficacy lies in the realm of matter at the mercy of external relations; yet spirit at certain phases and in certain temperaments may reach a harmonious integration of powers that detaches it from the distractions of animal faith so as to attain a virtual interior transcendence of its material nexus. A stranger, it lives as if pure spirit, even though it is not substantially so. Such spiritual life need not dwell only on the heights, like the mystic absorbed in his vision of Pure Being. It may come to a musician absorbed in his art, or to a child at play. It is actively free, pure, and self-justifying. It is both fruition and release.

Anthony Woodward, Living in the Eternal: A Study of George Santayana (1988), 111-112.