Ancient Art and Ritual

by Jane Ellen Harrison

But, though the feet of science are thus firmly planted on the solid ground of practical action, her head, too, sometimes touches the highest heavens. The real man of science, like the philosopher, soon comes to seek truth and knowledge for their own sake. In art, in science, in philosophy, there come eventually the same detachment from personal desire and practical reaction; and to artist, man of science, and philosopher alike, through this detachment there comes at times the same peace that passeth all understanding.

Attempts have been often made to claim for art the utility, the tool-making property, that characterizes the beginnings of science. Nothing is beautiful, it is sometimes said, that is not useful; the beauty of a jug or a table depends, we are often told, on its perfect adaptation to its use. There is here some confusion of thought and some obvious, but possibly unconscious, special pleading. Much of art, specially decorative art, arises out of utilities, but its aim and its criterion is not utility. Art may be structural, commemorative, magical, what-not, may grow up out of all manner of practical needs, but it is not till it is cut loose from these practical needs that Art is herself and comes to her own. This does not mean that the jugs or tables are to be bad jugs or tables, still less does it mean that the jugs or tables should be covered with senseless machine-made ornament; but the utility of the jug or table is a good in itself independent of, though often associated with, its merit as art.

No one has, I think, ever called Art “the handmaid of Science.” There is, indeed, no need to establish a hierarchy. Yet in a sense the converse is true and Science is the handmaid of Art. Art is only practicable as we have seen, when it is possible safely to cut off motor-reactions. By the long discipline of ritual man accustomed himself to slacken his hold on action, and be content with a shadowy counterfeit practice. Then last, when through knowledge he was relieved from the need of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for a moment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born. He can never quit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances and life gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold for longer spaces. Man subdues the world about him first by force and then by reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck, he needs brute force no longer, and needs reason no more to make tools for conquest. He is free to think for thought’s sake, he may trust intuition once again, and above all dare to lose himself in contemplation, dare to be more and more an artist. Only here there lurks an almost ironical danger. Emotion towards life is the primary stuff of which art is made; there might be a shortage of this very emotional stuff of which art herself is ultimately compacted.

Science, then, helps to make art possible by making life safer and easier, it “makes straight in the desert a highway for our God.” But only rarely and with special limitations easily understood does it provide actual material for art. Science deals with abstractions, concepts, class names, made by the intellect for convenience, that we may handle life on the side desirable to us. When we classify things, give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience that certain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it is convenient for us to know and register. These class-names being abstract—that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actual objects, do not easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easily become material for art whose function it is to express and communicate emotion. Particular qualities, like love, honour, faith, may and do stir emotion; and certain bundles of qualities like, for example, motherhood tend towards personification; but the normal class label like horse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remains a practical utility for science.

The abstractions, the class-names of science are in this respect quite different from those other abstractions or unrealities already studied—the gods of primitive religion. The very term we use shows this. Abstractions are things, qualities, dragged away consciously by the intellect, from actual things objectively existing. The primitive gods are personifications—i.e. collective emotions taking shape in imagined form. Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than the abstract horse. But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect for practical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, he re-begets it. He and all the other gods are, therefore, the proper material for art; he is, indeed, one of the earliest forms of art. The abstract horse, on the other hand, is the outcome of reflection. We must honour him as of quite extraordinary use for the purposes of practical life, but he leaves us cold and, by the artist, is best neglected.

There remains the relation of Art to Religion.[56] By now, it may be hoped, this relation is transparently clear. The whole object of the present book has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, how art is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form of ritual. We saw further that the primitive gods themselves were but projections or, if we like it better, personifications of the rite. They arose straight out of it.

Now we say advisedly “primitive gods,” and this with no intention of obscurantism. The god of later days, the unknown source of life, the unresolved mystery of the world, is not begotten of a rite, is not, essentially not, the occasion or object of art. With his relation to art—which is indeed practically non-existent—we have nothing to do. Of the other gods we may safely say that not only are they objects of art, they are its prime material; in a word, primitive theology is an early stage in the formation of art. Each primitive god, like the rite from which he sprang, is a half-way house between practical life and art; he comes into being from a half, but only half, inhibited desire.

Is there, then, no difference, except in degree of detachment, between religion and art? Both have the like emotional power; both carry with them a sense of obligation, though the obligation of religion is the stronger. But there is one infallible criterion between the two which is all-important, and of wide-reaching consequences. Primitive religion asserts that her imaginations have objective existence; art more happily makes no such claim. The worshipper of Apollo believes, not only that he has imagined the lovely figure of the god and cast a copy of its shape in stone, but he also believes that in the outside world the god Apollo exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such fictitious objectivities; they are eidola, idols, phantasms, not objective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because the worshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of the reality that he and his church or group have projected the god. He knows that prier, c’est élaborer Dieu; or, as he would put it, he is “one with” his god. Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actual practical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists on its actuality and objectivity.

Why does the conception of a god impose obligation? Just because and in so far as he claims to have objective existence. By giving to his god from the outset objective existence the worshipper prevents his god from taking his place in that high kingdom of spiritual realities which is the imagination, and sets him down in that lower objective world which always compels practical reaction. What might have been an ideal becomes an idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritual reactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though another and a more exacting and commanding fellow-man were added to the universe. But a moment’s reflection will show that, when we pass from the vague sense of power or mana felt by the savage to the personal god, to Dionysos or Apollo, though it may seem a set back it is a real advance. It is the substitution of a human and tolerably humane power for an incalculable whimsical and often cruel force. The idol is a step towards, not a step from, the ideal. Ritual makes these idols, and it is the business of science to shatter them and set the spirit free for contemplation. Ritual must wane that art may wax.

But we must never forget that ritual is the bridge by which man passes, the ladder by which he climbs from earth to heaven. The bridge must not be broken till the transit is made. And the time is not yet. We must not pull down the ladder till we are sure the last angel has climbed. Only then, at last, we dare not leave it standing. Earth pulls hard, and it may be that the angels who ascended might descend and be for ever fallen.