From Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison—heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard—that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding.
Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a “deeply religious atheist,” Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays—published at the dawn of World War I—unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us—young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane—revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change.
As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison’s essays are an “act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo,” challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.
Arvustused
Although she lamented living through an anti-rational age . . . 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.
Maria Popova, from the Foreword
Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced . . . She remains my hero . . . She has remained the iron in my soul. Mary Beard, London Review of Books
When I compare . . . Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated. Virginia Woolf, The New Statesman
She wrote with a pathos and engagement rare among her academic peers, and her whole approach to the classics . . . seemed to open up new worlds of thought and feeling . . . One [ has] to admire the passion and restless originality of her mind and the fructifying influence of her work on other writers. Roger Kimball, The New Criterion
Foreword by Maria Popova
Preface
I Crabbed Age and Youth
II Heresy and Humanity
III Unanimism and Conversion
IV Homo Sum: Being a Letter to an Anti-suffragist From an Anthropologist
V Scientiæ Sacra Fames
VI The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions
VII Alpha and Omega
VIII Art and Mr. Clive Bell
Epilogue on the War: Peace With Patriotism
Jane Ellen Harrison (18501928) was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of a prosperous timber broker; her mother died soon after she was born. Educated at home as a child, Harrison enrolled in 1874 in the newly established Newnham College for women, at Cambridge University, where she later taught. In 1903 Harrison published her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, followed in 1912 by Themis, works that synthesized new developments in archaeology and anthropology and helped revolutionize the study of ancient Greek civilization. A popular lecturer whose articles enjoyed a wide readership, Harrison retired from teaching in 1922 and spent her last years in Paris with her spiritual daughter, the poet Hope Mirrlees.
Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaningsometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and childrens books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Versea charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetryhas also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.
