When I was a child, I was a happy Catholic, not so much convinced of the truth of its theology as just swimming in waters in which I found myself born. Then, as an adolescent, I learned to put childish things away, and became a happy atheist. In addition to the healthy independence of a mind unfettered by wishful thinking, it seemed to me obvious that a secular society, a project inaugurated by the 18th-century Enlightenment but threatened ever since by theocratic bullies from all corners, was the only just and rational way to organize communal life. Then, as a young man, I learned to put childish things away, and returned to Catholicism, which offered an antidote to both the social fragmentation I saw all around me, as well as my own personal malaise. The way I was living was, I found, unsustainable, and it was related to the general unsustainability of the society I was living in. I discovered that the presumptions of atheism in particular and secularism in general were not only incoherent, but also based on earlier religious errors, a foundational contradiction that gave rise to all manner of intractable problems. Secular society, it seemed obvious to me, was a society that did not know itself, and atheism, as I had lived it, was a way of not knowing myself, either. Now, a significantly less young man, I am a Catholic who cherishes the project of secularism and has found that the earnest and humane atheism of others is often a better witness to the truth than the cynical and punitive effusions of some among the self-styled faithful. Whether anything will follow from my current position—I have to assume my mind will change again in one way or another—I can’t imagine yet another volte-face of the kind that marked my coming-of-age. One thing I can say for certain is that I have given up on simple oppositions.
It’s for this reason that I love reading the British linguist, classicist, pacifist, early feminist, and self-styled heretic, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1927). A scholar of Greek antiquity, Harrison, along with FM Cornford, Gilbert Murray, AB Cook, and others—a group known, despite some variance in locale, as the Cambridge Ritualists—revolutionized the study of the classics, especially in matters of culture and religion, by emphasizing the primacy of customs and practices over theology and explicit belief. Influenced both by the ascendant fields of anthropology and sociology—as represented by James Frazer and Emile Durkheim—and the radical innovations of Nietzsche, Freud, and especially Bergson, Harrison helped to dismantle Victorian assumptions about the ancient Greeks, demonstrating that, far from bleached-white, bloodless intellectuals, they were a deeply religious, ritualistic culture. In Harrison’s rendering, the much-vaunted Greeks, founders of the West, were as messy and ecstatic as any so-called primitive society, endlessly reenacting cycles of death and rebirth, which rational thought can only trail behind, gathering scraps and piecing them together mostly for the benefit of outsiders and fools. Perhaps her best-remembered insight comes from the preface to her 1890 study, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, where she writes:
My belief is that in many, even in the large majority of cases, ritual practices misunderstood explains the elaboration of myth…Some of the loveliest stories the Greeks have left us will be seen to have taken their rise, not in poetic imagination, but in primitive, often savage, and, I think, always practical ritual.
If this seems palatable, almost commonsensical now, it is worth emphasizing just how radical an innovation it was at the time, and the extent to which she understood its complexity. She was, after all, an intellectual, and her preoccupation with the relationship between the origins of Greek ritual and, for lack of a better phrase, higher Greek culture—philosophy, art, statecraft—led her to reimagine the place of study and critical thought in her own society.
The way she did this was fittingly practical. Harrison was among the first of what we now call public intellectuals, supporting herself primarily by giving lectures and writing articles for the popular press, whose readership had exploded by the end of the 19th century. Taking full advantage of then-recent innovations in sound and stage design, she put on elaborate performances consisting of gigantic projections of archaeological slides and, if reports are to be believed, some kind of light show. Her most noted performance was held in Glasgow, on the subject of Athenian gravestones. It was attended by 1,600 people. The popularity of her lectures, as well as her many contributions to the fields of classics and the study of religion, led to greater professional recognition and advancement: She received two honorary doctorates from the Universities of Aberdeen and Durham, and spent the last 20-plus years of her working life as a lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge, the progressive women’s college that was also her alma mater. But whatever her institutional bona fides, Harrison’s personal attitude remained ever defiant, her trademark being less the grand dame of academe and more the erstwhile enfant terrible turned eminence grise of free thinking.
I first encountered Harrison while down a rather tangential back alley of research during grad school. I was following a kind of ill-formed hunch—not uncommon in those days—wondering whether rationality itself, the supposedly unconditioned encounter of the mind with the structures of reality, might have a ritual aspect to it, that is, an element of the social and the habitual, as well as the religious, which would shape and guide its terms, and therefore have a role in the development of its content. In other words, if thinking is not just an abstract possibility, but an actual practice undertaken by living human beings, why wouldn’t it share the qualities of every other activity?
And so I stumbled across the Cambridge Ritualists, with Harrison at the center, arguing over a century earlier that not only reason, but all of human life involves participation in ritual practice, conditioning our minds and bodies both positively and negatively, setting the terms by which we discover our freedom. It was one of those moments when I simply could not understand how everyone wasn’t reading and responding to this work, swiftly followed by a lament for a time when, so it seems, everyone was.
Harrison was born to a wealthy Yorkshire family in 1850. Her father was a laconic yet witty man who instilled in her a certain suspicion of the established and then effectively mandatory Anglican Church of the day. In Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, one of the two Harrison volumes now reprinted by McNally Editions, she writes that he was “incapable of formulating a conviction,” and though he raised his children in the faith, “we…noticed that on what used to be called ‘Sacrament Sundays’ he was apt to have a slight attack of lumbago, which passed off on Monday morning.” This was largely in contrast to her step-mother’s pious Evangelicalism (her mother died not long after Jane was born, of a postpartum infection): “She was a Celt,” Harrison writes, “and her religion was of a fervent, semi-revivalist type…Her main doctrines were that we must be ‘born again’ and ‘God would have our whole hearts or nothing.’ I remember thinking this was not quite fair.” But even as a child Harrison could not quite shake the feeling that whatever the spiritual and intellectual inadequacies of bourgeois Christianity, there was something necessary about the way it structured their lives, not as theology, but as religion.
At Newnham College, founded only three years before Harrison’s arrival in 1874, she flourished in the burgeoning liberalism of the period, taking the opportunity to show off her wit and knowledge to every “great man and woman,” as she calls them, who made an appearance. The Russian novelist Turgenev visited, and because Harrison already spoke Russian—along with German, French, as well as Greek and Latin (she would eventually get a handle on around 15 languages)—she was given the task of showing him around. “Alas!” she writes, “he spoke fluent English; it was a grievous disappointment.” Her run-in with the eminent statesman William Gladstone, in those years trading terms as Prime Minister with his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, is recounted as much as a brush with history as evidence of the deviousness of her frenemy Helen, who also happened to be Gladstone’s daughter. Harrison writes:
I was a rigid Tory in those days, and I absolutely refused to join the mob of students cheering and clapping the Grand Old Man on his arrival. I shut myself up in my room. Thither—to tease me—[Helen] brought him. He sat down and asked me who was my favorite Greek author. Tact counselled Homer, but I was perverse and not quite truthful, so I said “Euripides.” Aeschylus would have been creditable, Sophocles respectable, but the sceptic Euripides! It was too much, and with a few words of warning he withdrew.
This is, of course, incredibly corny, but it’s also hard to turn from my book to my screen, see plans for a MMA fight on the South Lawn of the White House, and not pine for a time when politicians could be exercised by a college kid’s taste for the less-reputable Classical dramas.
Anyway, Harrison left Cambridge and went to London, and earned her living by lecturing. “I regret those lecturing years,” she writes. “I was voluble and had instant success, but it was mentally demoralizing and very exhausting.” And though she had no talent for her given subject, which was art, it nevertheless led her through archaeology to mythology and religion, where she found herself “at home.” She studied under leading scholars in London, Germany, Greece, Russia, and elsewhere, and developed her reputation as an interpreter of the Classical world, as well as her many friendships, love affairs, and infatuations. She may have been engaged to the Sanskrit scholar RA Neil, but he died suddenly of appendicitis. She was also frequently involved in friendships with both men and women that seem almost childish in how they flouted the line between Platonic and Romantic. Most of the last decade of her life she spent with the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, whom Harrison called her “spiritual daughter,” to which one can only say: uh-huh. Sure thing.
Throughout the years, especially once she secured her post at Newnham in 1899, Harrison devoted her attention not only to scholarship, but to the pressing social and political issues of the day. She was a vocal advocate of women’s suffrage, though her advocacy was of a curiously demure, contemplative sort, arguing the point not because she fervently believed in it, but because it would be simply irrational to disagree. She argues in “Homo Sum: Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist,” collected in the other new McNally volume, Alpha and Omega, that though sex is an “impulse” and “trait” necessary to the perpetuation of the species, it is also an impediment to its civilizational advancement, and therefore an indication of certain intractable tension in human life. For Harrison, this suggests that the advancement of women in society was not in itself a strict necessity, but a result of a complex of historically contingent evolutionary developments. “Man had, and in part, still has yet to learn that one half of humanity cannot be fully humanized without the other,” she writes, but this seems to be less because of any sense of justice or right, and more because the previous arrangement, which she calls “Man’s House,” has simply run its course. Patriarchy, for Harrison, is to be abandoned not for its manifest ills—nothing human, she insists, can ever be entirely healthy; what would that even mean?—but because it is outdated. “What is life?” she asks in “Scientae Sacra Fame,” which translates to “the accursed desire for sacred knowledge.” “Durée,” is the reply, after Bergson. “And what is durée? Changement. Every stagnant virtue rots straightway into a vice.”
This is as alien a perspective to us, as we eagerly await the fourth wave of justice-oriented feminism, as it was to the repressive patricians of her own day. “Heretic,” which she called, “from the outset, an eager, living word,” was a designation she bore with pride. She was vocally suspicious of traditional practices of worship, by which she meant the bourgeois Christianity that was then ubiquitous and, if less punitive than it had been, still more or less compulsory. She was even a founding member of the Cambridge Society of Heretics, at the inaugural meeting of which she remarked, “To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation.”
One of the joys of reading Harrison is coming across a quotation like this and following your own responses from instinctive reaction, through puzzled self-doubt, into edified curiosity, never quite coming to agree with her but feeling enlivened by the thought all the same. The first reading, almost a reflex at this point, would put her in line with the Dawkinses and Harrises of the world, gleefully swiping at religion and insisting on the autonomy of their own thought. Of course, she’s full of that kind of thing, and from every angle. On marriage: “sex-exclusiveness masquerades as the purity of the home.” On being raised Christian: “It only shows what a tough thing a healthy child’s mind is that any of us merged into even tolerable sanity.” So when she says she is a heretic, should we take her to be simply a proto-contrarian, the patron saint of people who are annoying on the internet?
I think it’s more complicated than that, the full extent of which you can only get by reading her yourself, becoming acquainted with her idiosyncratic habits of mind. Heresy, she goes on to say, is only possible or even desirable in certain moments of history, and only from certain perspectives. “If you are in danger of extinction, you must act swiftly, all together, all but automatically, you must not be a heretic.” But the situation becomes yet more complex, as she reflects on the dangers heresy poses even to the society that makes it safe to think heretically: the egotism it breeds can threaten the fellow-feeling and assumed kinship that allow for forays into the taboo. “Humanity is sympathy with infinite differences, with utter individualism, with complete differentiation, and it is only possible through the mystery of organic spiritual union.” For Harrison, true heresy is the operation of that union, which draws out difference in order to illuminate, if only by contrast, our deep, irrevocable affinity.
Though she had never been quite innocent—her wit, bordering on the cutting, is evident from her earliest writing—this dream of the altruism of heresy was given its severest test in the cataclysm of the First World War. As an older, academically inclined woman, her political engagements had up to that point been, like her feminism, of a generally progressive, if somewhat tepid tone. The war brought politics home in a new way, with Cambridge housing soldiers and meals reduced to rations of military quality. Preternaturally ironic, her horror begins above all in the simplicity of the sentiment that accompanied the early patriotic fervor that drove young men to battle, especially her colleagues in Cambridge. She was shocked that those who had devoted themselves to the endless, endlessly difficult task of discerning the truth by individual scholarship could throw themselves into the maw of that singularly destructive communal practice, war. Could this be another upswell of the mystical union of souls of which ancient Greek drama and modern philosophical psychology—the twin pillars of her intellectual landscape—otherwise so different from one another, are equal expressions? In the final essay of Alpha and Omega, “Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism,” Harrison makes clear just what a challenge this moment presented to her:
The War has brought about this release—that it is now possible to utter the word duty unabashed. Not even the youngest eyebrow is uplifted to mark the anachronism. But duty remains a question-begging label.
The dilemma, in other words, is not whether to abandon scholarship for the patriotic fight, which could be decided by simple ethical deliberation. Nor is it even whether to sacrifice the individual on the altar of the collective. The real dilemma, for Harrison anyway, is how even to discern between the individual and the collective, how to understand the role a single human being plays in the cataclysm of war, which, as she writes, “upsets every value,” not only because it kills, but because it sweeps through a society with an all-consuming imperative, bending every free-standing interest to its own ends. “The negative self-feeling of obedience is important,” she wrote in a letter at the time. “Combined with herd feeling it may generate abysses of abjectness.”
Always attuned to the power of ritual practice, Harrison, had she not died in 1929, would likely have been more horrified yet by the reliability with which these abysses of abjectness are opened with the mere declaration of war. This, I think, is what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote about the ritualization, by way of aesthetics, of politics by the forces of fascism: by militarizing all of society, the ebbs and flows of affinity and individuality are themselves conscripted into support for the campaign, mere plot points in the bloody drama. What, then, do we make of our own militarized society, which seems constantly under the banner of one war or another: cold wars, culture wars, wars on drugs and poverty? What of our war on terror, which, two decades on, has detached from its proximate sources and seems to be waged against the emotion itself, as well as anyone who stirs it up in the hearts of the powerful? Is it any wonder that the most enthusiastic supporters of each of these wars and the administrations that pursue them present themselves first as mavericks and outsiders, self-styled heretics railing against orthodoxies that blind us to the fight we are called to take up? Of course it’s hypocrisy, of course they’re playing their part, of course the abysses of abjectness are yawning at our feet. It is enough to drive anyone to despair, to rage. But that is the endless irony of thinking, and its constant renewal. Read Jane Ellen Harrison, who writes, “it is rage…that gives, most furiously, to think.”
