Instructions: After reading “Philanthropy” by George Santayana, write an essay answering the below questions.  Make sure that you support your responses by offering paraphrased corroboration from the text or examples from your own life. Your response should be no longer than 3 typewritten pages and should be submitted through the course website. Your essay should be a cohesive composition with complete paragraphs and sentences (not numerically organized answers), with proper spelling and punctuation, and satisfying all of the homework formatting requirements.

1.Describe the Stranger’s view of love?  Which of our classifications best fits the Stranger’s depiction of love?  Make sure that you include textual support in your answer.

2.Describe Socrates’ view of love?  Which of our classifications best fits the Socrates’ depiction of love in this reading?  Provide textual evidence for your view.

3.Do you think that human nature can sustain the type of love illustrated by the Stranger’s Prophet?  Why or why not?

1)  For the Stranger, love accepts a person as they exist in reality. While mortals may have aspirations to improve, Christianity assumes that this is not possible without divine intervention; that we are all sinners and our only redemption comes through the sacrifice of a divine being who became human, and the subsequent sacrifice of our own wills to this “god on earth.” Christianity takes a rather pessimistic view of humanity and morality, and therefore taints the concept of love in the process.

As the text points out, this view of love was notably endorsed by C.S. Lewis and can be interpreted as a sort of “agape by divine command.” Love everyone because God commands it so, and offers rewards if you do and punishment if you do not. (It kind of takes the spontaneity out of it doesn't it?)  Santayana's imaginary dialogue between the Christian stranger and Socrates becomes transparent right away, in my opinion, in its bias toward Socrates' criterion for love as the preferable one:

Socrates. “And does he love himself as he actually is or rather as he would wish to be?”           

The Stranger. “That is a hard question.”

Not exactly a definitive answer from the latter, and Socrates proceeds in his famous methodical manner to make the Stranger aware of the fallacies and paradoxes of Christian love, while also bringing him around to the more idealist and optimistic view. The Greeks, while also conceding that man has flaws, give humans more control of their own destinies, more choice in their rehabilitation, than the Christian notion that we cannot improve without God's help.

2)  The Socratic version of love, already touched upon to some degree, differs mainly from the Stranger's in its stressing that to truly love one's fellow man, we must strive to encourage that they reach their highest potential (Greek daimon); we must hold this idealized version of them within our minds. Socrates is thereby promoting a type of love that, although there are some elements of agape, is actually more similar to “eros as objective value.” The Greeks believed in “forms”, which were the idealized versions of such qualities as beauty, truth, etc. and that these also applied to individuals. Thus to love entails a seeking of this perfection within the object of one's affections.

As our text observes, there are criticisms of this “love of excellence” that include: (1) it is egotistical, (2) doesn't allow one to love a real person, (3) excludes men with little or no virtue, and (4) is doomed to failure. I think the critics take this striving for the ideal too literally; of course none of us can ever attain perfection. It is simply the process of attempting it that can refine us to be the best we can.

3)  The Stranger's “Prophet” is of course Jesus Christ, who by tradition, myth, or belief (it all depends on your perspective) was a divine being, a God come to Earth in human form. This deification of love makes it all but impossible that human nature could sustain it for more than mere moments at a time. We can understand on an intellectual level, and perhaps in brief enlightened instances achieve it. But as the Stranger himself points out, this prophet “did not look upon the world with the eyes of a mortal... He ignored, with a compassionate indulgence, all liberal arts, sciences and ambitions.”

In short, although in human form, the Prophet was still an alien, who was equally enamored of all life here on the planet, the “lilies of the field... the sparrows.” He loved mankind but was not a man, and though he hoped to save man, he didn't think it was possible without divine help. Humans could not sustain such love because it is not human.