The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy – The Marginalian
Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages.
“Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking on the cold hard floor of a world that has always mistaken the limits of the imagination for the limits of reality. And I thought of Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a “deeply religious atheist” and devoted her life to excavating the roots of the religious impulse from the clay of the psyche, teaching us that it is not who or what we pray to but what we pray for that reveals and redeems our lives; that what we pray for, not on our knees but in our choices and the stories we tell about them, conjures up the world we yearn to live in and it is our yearning that we act upon to make the world. Every choice we make in our political and personal lives is a prayer. All change is prayerful action toward a different kind of world — an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo.
“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life. She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by “her superb high thinking agnostic ways.” In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw “how the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,” saw how science and spirituality both reach for that “invisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.” She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in “the value of each individual manifestation of life,” and above all in the merging of the two in “the strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.”
She cherished the “inward and abiding patience” of science, its “gentleness” in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a “necessary step in the evolution of human thought,” but she detested its dogmas — its “net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,” the way its doctrines “distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.” She sought to understand the need for it: “Man,” she wrote when we were all men, “feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking, he develops a god.” Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is — that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is “the new religion for which the world wait” but “already is, if unconsciously, our religion.” She insisted that in order to attain “real freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,” we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. “Repression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,” she warned in the first year of the world’s first global war, urging us to take “a step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.”
Because she recognized that faith is an adaptation of the self, she was especially fascinated by experiences of religious conversion, by all mystical experiences, fascinated by how they tend to come just after moments of profound personal crisis or heartbreak, when “some shattering blow has been dealt to a man’s personality, to his affection or ambition.” Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness — in conversion, “the individual spirit is socialized.” She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way “it holds immediate personal reaction in suspense” to reveal a larger reality — “the whole, the unbounded whole,” to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold “the real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,” we create “various and shifting” eikon — Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon. This “attempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known” is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are. Here speaks Harrison the heretic:
To be an Atheist, then, […] is to me personally almost an essential of religious life.
Harrison came to the study of faith through the back door. Raised “Evangelical, almost, though not quite, to the point of Calvinism,” she grew quickly disenchanted with the unthinking dogmas of religion, but remained “a ritualist at heart.” By her mid-twenties, she had become “a complete Agnostic.” She would later recall:
Having tried all the theologies open to me, I came to the conclusion that religion was not for me, that it said nothing to my spiritual life, and I threw myself passionately into the study of literature and art.
But that secular passion took her back to the sacred — Greek art led her to Greek mythology, where she could suddenly see religion’s myriad tendrils into every tissue of human thought and feeling, into the gloaming regions of the psyche, where our half-conscious hopes and fears dwell, into everything animating our search for meaning in these transient lives between atom and dust; she could suddenly touch the “vital and tremendous impulse” beneath all the “pernicious superstitious errors” of dogmatism, recognized it as “a thing fraught indeed with endless peril, but great and glorious, inspiring, worth all a lifetime’s devotion.”
“It was not that I was spiritually lonely or ‘seeking for the light,’” she recalled, “it was that I felt religion was my subject.” It held no interest to her as a “personal question,” but she was drawn to how, across cultures and civilizations, it has voiced and shaped the questions our species asks of the universe, the questions we ask of ourselves — the unanswerable questions the only answer to which is life.
This is why Harrison never faulted religion for the divisive dogmas sundering humanity, for she saw that it only “embodies and reflects social fact,” the fact of our need to feel right and right together, breaking our fingers on the faults of the designated other — a gesture we mistake for belonging, a false kind of faith. She could have been writing about the herd righteousness of social media when she admonished, ahead of two world wars, that “the only human will to which we bow nowadays is the collective will of the people of which we are ourselves a part.” Righteousness is a species of certainty, mortised and tenoned with the myth of control, and the sense of control has always been what we reach for in the absence of faith.
She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as “that commerce with the unseen and unknown” that is the natural consequence of our imagination and our capacity for free thought. Theology, she thought, is a metastasis of our unease with the unknown, of our need to create a referent for it in the known — something to make us feel “relieved, comforted, reassured, at home” — and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are “a moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.” It was faith she was interested in — the psychology of it, the source of it, the different meanings and manifestations of it to different people at different times across different cultures. The questions at the heart of faith — what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions — became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.
In consonance with Willard Gibbs’s koan-like pronouncement that in science “the sum is simpler than its parts,” Harrison knew that in society “the real issue of a problem is always best seen when its factors are so far as possible simplified.” Equality was the great problem of her time and dismantling the wall society has always erected against it — the wall called bias — was the great occupation of her mind. She recognized bias as a species of belief, related therefore to the religious impulse, and she saw the “serious spiritual danger” that all systems of oppression pose — to all whose lives they touch, but most of all to the oppressor, the warden of bias.
Because she knew that “thought, to be living, does and must arise straight out of life,” she knew that to understand a style of thinking — a belief, an opinion, a bias — one must understand the life from which it arose. “What always interests and often helps me,” she wrote, “is to be told of any conviction seriously and strongly felt by another mind, especially if I can at the same time learn in detail the avenues by which that conviction has been approached.” When a young colleague declared that no one over the age of thirty is worth speaking to, Harrison delighted in the live specimen on her dissection table:
This is really very interesting and extraordinarily valuable. Here we have, not a reasoned conclusion, but a real live emotion, a good solid prejudice.
[…]
It is my business to understand and, if I can, learn from it. Give me an honest prejudice, and I am always ready to attend to it.
She saw right and wrong as distractions from what must always be the aim and the end:
I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them; there is so much still waiting to be understood.
This way of thinking is, of course, not only countercultural but downright heretical in our own era of blame-thirsty opinions ossified into identities — because understanding is a dynamic thing, evolving as it integrates and relates new information, it is the antithesis to the stasis of opinion and an antidote to it, a way of remembering that we must go on changing in order to go on living. This is why Harrison held her own opinions lightly — she knew that life changes us, changes the fabric of a person, “dyes and alters the whole personality, so that it never is, never can be the same.” She reflects on her changed views on suffrage, to which she was initially indifferent — that Stockholm syndrome of the psyche that hypnotizes the oppressed, even the brilliant among them, into siding with the oppressor:
Politics seemed to me, personally, heavy and sometimes rather dirty work.
[…]
I am not ashamed of my lack of interest in politics. That deficiency still remains and must lie where it has always lain, on the knees of the gods. But that I failed to sympathize with a need I did not feel, of that I am truly ashamed. From that inertia and stupidity I was roused by [the] delicate and fastidious women who faced the intimate disgusts of prison life because they and their sister-women wanted a Vote. Something caught me in the throat. I felt that they were feeling, and then, because I felt, I began to understand. To feel keenly is often, if not always, an amazing intellectual revelation. You have been wandering in that disused rabbit-warren of other people’s opinions and prejudices which you call your mind, and suddenly you are out in the light.
Suddenly, she could see the patriarchy for the dogma that it is, gender for the dogma that it is, socially constructed and morally enforced. Long before her friend Virginia Woolf threw the gauntlet of Orlando at the binaries of gender, Jane Ellen Harrison set out to dismantle the dogma. The mind, she insisted, has no gender, but each mind has elements of the feminine and the masculine — the feminine being more “resonant,” the masculine more “insulated.” This word choice is too peculiar not to betray Jane Ellen Harrison’s influence on Woolf, who would soon write in A Room of One’s Own that the most “naturally creative” mind is “the androgynous mind,” which is “resonant and porous.” Each person, Harrison wrote in a blazing public letter to an anti-suffragist, is the product of “an accident of sex” within and around which are gender roles that play out politically, socially, and personally — artificial binaries that are a product of a “moral industry” resting upon a “rather complex confusion of thought . . . dangerous and disastrous to the individual, dangerous and disastrous to the society of which he or she is a unit.”
These were heretical ideas, a century ahead of their time. Suffrage was to her merely an instrument for breaking down these binaries in order to liberate the human potential in each person and thus elevate the whole of society. I don’t know if even Jane Ellen Harrison could envision a world in which women enter politics in large numbers and in leadership positions — even the greatest visionaries can never fully bend their gaze past the horizon of their culture’s given — but I do think she understood both the vector of change and the long axis of time along which it progresses, always against the tremendous counterforce of the status quo. More than a century before the world’s second-largest democracy twice rejected a female president, she observed:
The beginnings of a movement are always dark and half unconscious, characterized rather by a blind unrest and sense of discomfort than by a clear vision of the means of relief.
It is sobering to find ourselves still in the restless shadows a century hence. But she understood the paradox of why even in our reach for light we are prone to self-sabotage: “Perfect sanity can never fairly be demanded from those in bondage or in pain.” This, perhaps, can only be so: All substantive change requires reaching for something so different from what is as to border on the unimaginable, which in turn requires trusting that the unimaginable is possible — a supreme act of faith. Faith is always larger than reason in its imagination and is therefore saner.
This is why, although she lamented living through an “anti-rational age” in which reason seemed to have “suffered a certain eclipse,” Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life, that time is the richest subject of philosophy, that the poet’s job is to love people and show them “the bigness, the beauty, of their lives,” that science should resist the push toward specialization and break down the artificial boundaries between disciplines that keep us from seeing the full picture of reality. Out of her life and her work, out of her politics and her passions, arises her simple animating ethos: “By contacts we are saved.”
And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love — the supreme unselfing, the great cathedral of the mystery to which all science and all religion are an incomplete response, the light looking out from the face between the palms that we may call faith. “Learning severs us from all but a few — love reunites us,” she wrote. “Such is the mystery of life.”
The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven — an unseasonable spring day of “bitter windy rain” — Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando — her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the great love of her own life — and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane’s partner, “the colour of dirty brown paper,” distraught and “half sleep” with grief.
Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:
We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.
Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading “some of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,” but she felt unmoved.
As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?
Outside, “a bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.”
Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. “It was more comforting than all my other letters put together,” she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:
But remember what you have had.
