I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we were able to see clearly for the first time.
In _Prosaic Misunderstandings_ he makes us realise precisely what we mean by religion.
"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The mass of mankind is divided into two classes--the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination."
"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."
Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry descended among men."
The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry.
Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the imagination: they made man understand the pathos and nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.