The Last Puritan: George Santayana's Philosophical Novel

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863 and died in Rome
in 1952. Although he spent his formative and professional years in Boston, he never gave up his
Spanish citizenship; and in 1912, after abruptly retiring as Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, he
left the United States for good to lead a wandering life in Europe.
Man of Letters
To describe Santayana as a philosopher does not do justice to the range and exceptional brilliance of
his mind. In addition to philosophy, he wrote poetry, plays, biblical criticism, literary criticism, and a
best-selling novel; he was, in the old sense of the phrase, a Man of Letters. 'A Humanist', Santayana
once wrote, 'means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an
accomplishment, not a doctrine.' All of Santayana's works embody this idea in that each of them is
suffused with diverse streams of literary, historical, and philosophical thought.
A Novel of Ideas
Santayana's novel, The Last Puritan (published in 1935), tells the story of the life of Oliver Alden, a
wealthy New Englander who is a direct descendant of the first puritans to come to America. The first
part of the novel is concerned with Oliver's father, Peter Alden, and his estranged relationship with
his reclusive older brother, Nathaniel. After accidently killing a man at Harvard, Peter goes into
exile abroad and spends the next 15 years drifting through Asia and Europe. Upon returning to
Boston, Peter marries Harriet Bumstead, another progeny of puritan stock, and Oliver is born.
Oliver is raised by his mother and a German governess, Fraulein Irma Schlote, rarely seeing his
father, who degenerates into a permanent drug-induced invalidity. While on a sailing excursion with
his father, Oliver meets and befriends Jim Darnley, an English sea captain who runs his fathers boat.
Later, while visiting his father in England, our hero meets his half-Italian, half-American cousin
Mario Van de Weyer, who is a student at Eton. Oliver's encounters on these journeys between New
England and England serve as set-pieces for exploring the inner thought and feeling of all the main
characters. The Last Puritan also includes long letters and extended dialogues that address various
moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical notions on which Santayana aims to ponder over.
The Last Puritan is foremost a novel of ideas. And although there are intimations of the Freudian
themes of repression and unconscious sexual longing, e.g. Fraulein Irmas love for Oliver and Oliver's
physical attraction to Jim Darnley, Santayana is less concerned with psychological analysis than he is
with the examination of characters as ideal types. 'I dont believe in development of character',
Santayana writes, 'the character is always the same; but there is a progress from innocent to mature
ways of giving that character expression.' This statement is inspired by Santayana's belief that great
characters in fiction manifest 'the inward nature of an individual soul.' Fictional characters should
not be mere imitations of persons observed in everyday life; they ought to be rich and vibrant
figments of the author's imagination.
Matter and Spirit
In The Last Puritan, Santayana portrays Oliver as a spiritual journeyman struggling to reconcile
competing moral, intellectual, and instinctual impulses. The resulting travail of this condition reflect
two of the most important aspects of Santayana's naturalist philosophy.

Central to Santayana's metaphysical convictions is an unshakeable faith in the primacy of matter:

the unceasing and dynamic flux of nature. Matter is the 'field of action' in which humans strive to
live. Santayana views human behavior as a system of patterns that enables the human animal to
adjust to its environment. Each person has a bundle of habits that constitute the kernel self.
Santayana contrasts this 'psyche' and its existence in the realm of matter with the various modes
and functions of the realm of spirit: 'Other names for spirit are consciousness, attention, feeling,
thought, or any other word that marks the total inner difference between being awake or asleep,
alive or dead.'
Spirit is the non-physical dimension of human life that serves as a moral signifier, an inner light that
shines upon the actualities of what is given in intuition or the qualities of what is possible in
imagination. Spirit is an emergent property of the psyche, giving depth and meaning to experience,
and seeking to discern the good or beautiful in all things laid before it.
Santayana believed that the being of humankind is divided into elements of matter and spirit. If
spirit were to simply observe and reflect, he argues, then it would be in perfect harmony with
matter. But in certain persons there is an impulse to live a life governed completely by spirit: and to
live a spiritual life is to live authentically; it is to allow one's thought and action to be animated by an
awareness of one's beliefs and convictions.
The Tragedy of the Spiritual Life
The Last Puritan was drawn from Santayana's experience growing up in Boston; in letters,
Santayana writes that its characters are amalgamations of various persons he knew in his youth.
Oliver manifests the twentieth century New England puritan trying to live a spiritual life. But he is a
different kind of puritan from his overly moralistic mother and his excessively insular uncle. Oliver
affirms his puritan identity insofar as it 'meant being self-directed and inflexibly himself'. The
problem is that Oliver never decides what to direct himself toward. He remains unaware of his
nature as a spiritual person, and becomes instead a wandering bundle of ideals without purpose or
aim, striving for an undefined purity.
For Santayana, ideals are formed and chosen from personal inclination. This is a condition of
material existence. As The Last Puritan unfolds Oliver is slow to recognize his inability to adjust
peaceably to such an existence. He loves Jim's worldly manliness but becomes disillusioned with his
character and his scandalous past. He admires Mario's urbane manners and sensuous nature but
knows he could never enjoy his cousin's Epicurean contentment. Oliver can formulate no sound basis
upon which to judge the rightness or wrongness of anyone's ideals, including his own.
The realities of nature condition and constrain, while the phenomenon of spirit empowers and
liberates. In The Last Puritan, Santayana depicts the tensions and paradoxes to be experienced by
anyone who dares to rise above mere instinct, and describes the inevitable tragedy of those who
seek to live the eternal life of spirit.
Sources
McCormick, John. George Santayana: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1987.
Santayana, George. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. New York: Charles
Scribners Sons, 1935.
Santayana, George. Realms of Being. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1942.

Singer, Irving. George Santayana, Literary Philosopher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Sprigge, Timothy L.S. Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1974.
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