Neuhaus on Santayana

The second coming of a biography of George Santayana spurs Richard John Neuhaus to reflect on his early encounter with the philosopher's work. Sample:

Yet he was an influence, and not an insignificant influence. He proposed to my young mind not a philosophical doctrine, and certainly not a system, but a sensibility and style. He wrote with fetching grace on the really big questions about which clever youth fancies itself deadly earnest—the meaning of life and whether or not history is purposeful, for example—and he did so in a manner that intimated an urbanity and worldly wisdom exceeding my limited experience. Most vividly, I recall reading Character and Opinion in the United States which, as Santayana intended, provided both an introduction to something like an American intellectual tradition and a schooling in its regrettable inadequacies. There were other books—The Sense of Beauty, Reason in Religion, and his one novel, The Last Puritan—but they did not inspire me to take on hugely ambitious works such as The Life of Reason and his last major project, Dominations and Powers.

The article is a good read. I knew nothing about Santayana going in, but came out with a sense of his essence as a man and a philosopher.