{"id":11489,"date":"2025-09-06T18:17:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-forgotten-visionary-jane-ellen-harrison-on-change-the-meaning-of-faith-and-the-courage-of-heresy-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T18:17:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:17:03","slug":"the-forgotten-visionary-jane-ellen-harrison-on-change-the-meaning-of-faith-and-the-courage-of-heresy-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-forgotten-visionary-jane-ellen-harrison-on-change-the-meaning-of-faith-and-the-courage-of-heresy-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

Alpha and Omega<\/a>, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions<\/a>. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>\u201cHave faith,\u201d someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands \u2014 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 \u2014 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<\/a> (September 9, 1850\u2013April 15, 1928) \u2014 the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a \u201cdeeply religious atheist\u201d 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 \u2014 an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Altarpiece<\/em> by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cTo be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,\u201d Jane Ellen Harrison declared<\/a> 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 \u201cher superb high thinking agnostic ways.\u201d 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 \u201chow the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,\u201d saw how science and spirituality both reach for that \u201cinvisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.\u201d She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in \u201cthe value of each individual manifestation of life,\u201d and above all in the merging of the two in \u201cthe strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.\u201d <\/p>\n

She cherished the \u201cinward and abiding patience\u201d of science, its \u201cgentleness\u201d 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 \u201cnecessary step in the evolution of human thought,\u201d but she detested its dogmas \u2014 its \u201cnet of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,\u201d the way its doctrines \u201cdistract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.\u201d She sought to understand the need for it: \u201cMan,\u201d she wrote when we were all men, \u201cfeels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his con\u00adfused thinking, he develops a god.\u201d 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 \u2014 that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is \u201cthe new religion for which the world wait\u201d but \u201calready is, if unconsciously, our religion.\u201d She insisted that in order to attain \u201creal freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,\u201d we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. \u201cRepression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,\u201d she warned in the first year of the world\u2019s first global war, urging us to take \u201ca step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition<\/a> of Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/em>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u201csome shattering blow has been dealt to a man\u2019s personality, to his affection or ambition.\u201d Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness \u2014 in conversion, \u201cthe individual spirit is socialized.\u201d She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way \u201cit holds immediate personal re\u00adaction in suspense\u201d to reveal a larger reality \u2014 \u201cthe whole, the unbounded whole,\u201d to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold \u201cthe real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,\u201d we create \u201cvarious and shifting\u201d eikon<\/em> \u2014 Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon<\/em>. This \u201cattempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known\u201d is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are. Here speaks Harrison the heretic: <\/p>\n

\n

To be an Atheist, then, [\u2026] is to me personally almost an essential of religious life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Harrison came to the study of faith through the back door. Raised \u201cEvangelical, almost, though not quite, to the point of Calvinism,\u201d she grew quickly disenchanted with the unthinking dogmas of religion, but remained \u201ca ritualist at heart.\u201d By her mid-twenties, she had become \u201ca complete Agnostic.\u201d She would later recall: <\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But that secular passion took her back to the sacred \u2014 Greek art led her to Greek mythology, where she could suddenly see religion\u2019s 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 \u201cvital and tremendous impulse\u201d beneath all the \u201cpernicious superstitious errors\u201d of dogmatism, recognized it as \u201ca thing fraught indeed with endless peril, but great and glorious, inspiring, worth all a lifetime\u2019s devotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not that I was spiritually lonely or \u2018seeking for the light,\u2019\u201d she recalled, \u201cit was that I felt religion was my subject.\u201d It held no interest to her as a \u201cpersonal question,\u201d 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 \u2014 the unanswerable questions the only answer to which is life. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA \/ Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is why Harrison never faulted religion for the divisive dogmas sundering humanity, for she saw that it only \u201cembodies and reflects social fact,\u201d the fact of our need to feel right and right together, breaking our fingers on the faults of the designated other \u2014 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 \u201cthe only human will to which we bow nowadays is the collective will of the people of which we are ourselves a part.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as \u201cthat commerce with the unseen and unknown\u201d 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 \u2014 something to make us feel \u201crelieved, comforted, reassured, at home\u201d \u2014 and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are \u201ca moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.\u201d It was faith she was interested in \u2014 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 \u2014 what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions \u2014 became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Carson Ellis from In the Half Room<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In consonance with Willard Gibbs\u2019s koan-like pronouncement that in science \u201cthe sum is simpler than its parts,\u201d<\/a> Harrison knew that in society \u201cthe real issue of a problem is always best seen when its factors are so far as possible simplified.\u201d Equality was the great problem of her time and dismantling the wall society has always erected against it \u2014 the wall called bias \u2014 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 \u201cserious spiritual danger\u201d that all systems of oppression pose \u2014 to all whose lives they touch, but most of all to the oppressor, the warden of bias. <\/p>\n

Because she knew that \u201cthought, to be living, does and must arise straight out of life,\u201d she knew that to understand a style of thinking \u2014 a belief, an opinion, a bias \u2014 one must understand the life from which it arose. \u201cWhat always interests and often helps me,\u201d she wrote, \u201cis 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.\u201d When a young colleague declared that no one over the age of thirty is worth speaking to, Harrison delighted<\/a> in the live specimen on her dissection table:<\/p>\n

\n

This is really very interesting and extraordinarily valuable. Here we have, not a reasoned conclusion, but a real live emotion, a good solid prejudice. <\/p>\n

[\u2026] <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She saw right and wrong as distractions from what must always be the aim and the end: <\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This way of thinking is, of course, not only countercultural but downright heretical in our own era of blame-thirsty opinions ossified into identities \u2014 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 \u2014 she knew that life changes us, changes the fabric of a person, \u201cdyes and alters the whole personality, so that it never is, never can be the same.\u201d She reflects on her changed views on suffrage, to which she was initially indifferent \u2014 that Stockholm syndrome of the psyche that hypnotizes the oppressed, even the brilliant among them, into siding with the oppressor:<\/p>\n

\n

Politics seemed to me, personally, heavy and sometimes rather dirty work. <\/p>\n

[\u2026] <\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 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\u2019s opinions and prejudices which you call your mind, and suddenly you are out in the light.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em> 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 \u2014 the feminine being more \u201cresonant,\u201d the masculine more \u201cinsulated.\u201d This word choice is too peculiar not to betray Jane Ellen Harrison\u2019s influence on Woolf, who would soon write in A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em> that the most \u201cnaturally creative\u201d mind is \u201cthe androgynous mind,\u201d which is \u201cresonant and porous.\u201d<\/a> Each person, Harrison wrote in a blazing public letter to an anti-suffragist, is the product of \u201can accident of sex\u201d within and around which are gender roles that play out politically, socially, and personally \u2014 artificial binaries that are a product of a \u201cmoral industry\u201d resting upon a \u201crather complex confusion of thought . . . dangerous and disastrous to the individual, dangerous and disastrous to the society of which he or she is a unit.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2019t know if even Jane Ellen Harrison could envision a world in which women enter politics in large numbers and in leadership positions \u2014 even the greatest visionaries can never fully bend their gaze past the horizon of their culture\u2019s given \u2014 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\u2019s second-largest democracy twice rejected a female president, she observed: <\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Anna Read from The Wanting Monster<\/em><\/a> by Martine Murray<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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: \u201cPerfect sanity can never fairly be demanded from those in bondage or in pain.\u201d 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 \u2014 a supreme act of faith. Faith is always larger than reason in its imagination and is therefore saner. <\/p>\n

This is why, although she lamented living through an \u201canti-rational age\u201d in which reason seemed to have \u201csuffered a certain eclipse,\u201d 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\u2019s job is to love people and show them \u201cthe bigness, the beauty, of their lives,\u201d 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: \u201cBy contacts we are saved.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love \u2014 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. \u201cLearning severs us from all but a few \u2014 love re\u00adunites us,\u201d she wrote. \u201cSuch is the mystery of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven \u2014 an unseasonable spring day of \u201cbitter windy rain\u201d \u2014 Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando<\/em> \u2014 her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West<\/a>, the great love of her own life \u2014 and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane\u2019s partner, \u201cthe colour of dirty brown paper,\u201d distraught and \u201chalf sleep\u201d with grief. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:<\/p>\n

\n

We kissed by Cromwell\u2019s daughter\u2019s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading \u201csome of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,\u201d but she felt unmoved. <\/p>\n

\n

As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is \u2018God\u2019 & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Outside, \u201ca bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.\u201d <\/p>\n

Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. \u201cIt was more comforting than all my other letters put together,\u201d she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:<\/p>\n

\n

But remember what you have had.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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