Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 32 Fall 2014

              Henry Levinson's Santayana:
Interpreter and Trickster
Henry Levinson was my mentor and my friend. For five years I had the
pleasure of being his student at UNCG and learning about Santayana,
James, and other philosophers before heading off to graduate school at
Princeton, as he had.
Henry Levinson was the author of Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life
(1992), along with numerous articles about Santayana (but also and earlier, about
William James). He trained at Stanford under William Clebsch, where the inclination
to think of an American aesthetic tradition of religious thought was instilled in him
by bis mentor. At Princeton he made "Henry-characteristic" contributions that
helped shape a Princeton "school" of pragmatism.
Levinson's canon within the Santayana canon included: the essay "Religion
of Disillusion" from Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, the essay "Ultimate
Religion," and the book Reason in Religion from Santayana's Life of Reason series
— but the highlight for Levinson was Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies,
particularly the "Later Soliloquies" and in particular the essays 'The World's a
Stage," "Masks," 'The Tragic Mask," 'The Comic Mask," "Carnival," and "Hermes
the Interpreter." These essays, along with the work on ritual by Victor Turner and the
essays on religion and culture by Clifford Geertz, fairly well summed up Henry's
vision of what religion was — at least after his earlier Clebsch and James focus.
Any interpretation of a writer selects what to emphasize as a key to interpreting
all the rest of the work, but also what to soft-pedal. The parts of Santayana's corpus
Levinson acknowledged as present but gracefully dismissed as unfortunate include
Santayana's lack of taste for democracy, the neo-Platonic elements in his work, his
easily misunderstood and idiosyncratic use of the word "essences" (an unfortunate
choice of term for a philosopher Levinson portrayed, rightly I think, as a pragmatist)
and the "anti-Hebraic" bent to his thought.
This description of Levinson's Santayana will first address Levinson's take on
Santayana's naturalism, and then examine the framework Santayana provided for
discussing religious naturalism. This framework focused on three aspects of religion
and was used inReason inReligion: let's call these three categories, first, "contingent
piety"; second, "imaginative spirituality"; and last but definitely not least, "comic
charily." Then I'll turn to the question of what the legacy of Levinson's Santayana
might be; certainly I have made use of these three categories in my own work (see
Eddy 2003). For the pragmatist tradition, Santayana provides useful critical leverage
on Dewey's progressive faith; and finally, on the interdisciplinary borderlands of
scholarship, Levinson's Santayana highlights the kinship of a hermeneutical
approach to religious studies in the humanities and cultural anthropology in the
social sciences.
Santayana's Naturalism
What was important to Levinson in Santayana's religious naturalism was, on the one
hand, its tough-mindedness and unflinching nerve to face the worst news nature had