Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
identity, Santayana was very much in a tra-
dition of Spanish humanists that stretched
back to the Renaissance. Among Santaya-
na's significant works are
The Sense of Beauty
(1896),
The Life of Reason
(five volumes,
1905-06),
Scepticism and Animal Faith
(1923),
The Realms of Being
(four volumes, 1927-40),
and
Dominations and Powers
(1951).
Santiago de Compostela
The most important religious site in Spain
and, during the Middle Ages, ranked with
Rome and Jerusalem as a destination of pil-
grimages, the early history of Santiago de
Compostela is interwoven with inconsistent
and clearly legendary accounts of its origin.
According to the most frequently cited ver-
sion, Spain was visited shortly after the
death of Jesus, by his apostle James, who
was the first preacher of Christianity in the
Iberian Peninsula. (Santiago is the Spanish
equivalent of St. James.) The tradition
asserts that the saint returned to the Holy
Land, was martyred there, and was then
carried back in a sarcophagus, transported
by his followers to northwestern Spain. The
account tells of a shepherd discovering his
burial place hundreds of years later when
he noticed a constellation of stars above the
location (hence the name
campo stella,
or
“field of stars”). The site was certified as a
place of veneration by the clergy, and a
chapel was erected there by the local ruler.
What had been a mere village became, dur-
ing the early Middle Ages, the major town
in the region of G
ALICIA
. After the original
chapel was destroyed in a Muslim raid, an
impressive cathedral was built in the 11th
century to serve as the focus for religious
ceremonies and visits by a growing number
of pilgrims.
George Santayana
(Library of Congress)
severing his early academic connections. He
sought to pursue his aesthetic and philo-
sophical interests to the exclusion of mun-
dane concerns, taking little interest, for
example, in World Wars I and II. A prolific
author, whose writings included poetry and
a well-regarded novel (
The Last Puritan,
1935), his primary concern was in the
exposition of philosophical theories in the
fields of aesthetics, the motivation of human
actions and institutions, and variations on
the concept of pragmatism. A number of his
ideas won wide acceptance, although in
later years he was criticized for the seeming
contradictions in some of his arguments.
For all of his self-proclaimed American
Search WWH ::
Custom Search