Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

10. Interpreting Together: The Cambridge Ritualists’ Affair of the Intellect

189 chapter 10 Interpreting Together The Cambridge Ritualists’ Affair of the Intellect From the long-standing extended academic networks of a Germanspeaking religious order, we turn to some affectionate intellectual enthusiasms that blossomed for a time in Cambridge, England, before the First World War. For somewhat more than ten years, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford—known as the Cambridge Ritualists —interacted creatively with one another in ways that were extremely fertile. The scope of their intellectual interplay also included others in classical studies—especially Arthur Bernard Cook, who is sometimes mentioned as the fourth Cambridge Ritualist—but the bonds of affection between Harrison, Murray, and Cornford were particularly intense. These affective ties contributed to an intellectual dynamic among the three that differed from those seen in diffusionist collaborations. Diffusionist groups found common cause in their theoretical agendas, which were presented as broad explanations. If particular individuals elaborated their own hypotheses and took their investigations in new directions , they were still united in trying to pursue the ramifications of a specific historical premise. To work on their common agenda, adherents of a particular theory just had to manage to get along—they didn’t have to be particularly fond of one another. There were in-group loyalties within all the diffusionist circles, to be sure, nurtured in part by outside opposition, and some real friendships among the Panbabylonians, but Schmidt and his colleagues didn’t always seem to like one another very much. Binding the latter, instead, were institutional links, deeply held 190 Working Together belief, and personal familiarity of sometimes very long standing—a religious order’s family ties, which sometimes chafed. The story of Schmidt and his brothers in faith thus sometimes reads like an extended family saga. The story of the Cambridge Ritualists, by contrast, might be characterized as an affair of the intellect: tempestuous and slightly scandalous . Not only Harrison, but Cornford and Murray, too, had original personalities and creative minds. The three came together in intellectual interplay for a while, inspired and encouraged one another in complementary directions, and then went their separate ways. Their ideas— which entailed bringing anthropological insights to classical texts— were daring for their day, sometimes even outrageous in the conservative world of their contemporary classical scholarship.1 Adding to the aura of scandal were complex erotic undercurrents in the feelings of Harrison for the two men (flowing much less strongly, it seems, in the opposite direction ), which were evident to some observers then as they are now. These added tensions to interpersonal dynamics but also no doubt helped sustain the group’s fertility. What emerged among the three intellectually was less a shared explanatory theory of the sort seen among diffusionists than a shared interpretive temperament—nurtured together but sustaining separate projects. Because documented examples of intellectual cooperation in the humanities are relatively rare and the Ritualists were interesting personalities , their interrelationship has been given renewed attention in the last decades.2 Robert Ackerman’s careful work on the Ritualists presents acute insights into their intellectual background, writings, and important elements of their interaction. His description of them as “a more or less coherent group with a unified program,”3 however, has been challenged by Mary Beard and especially by Annabel Robinson, who writes about “Deconstructing the ‘Cambridge Ritualists.’ ” Both of these writers emphasize the evident lack of a common agenda among the three and the genuine differences in their works. Although I agree with them, I think that Ackerman also saw something important. There was an unusual coherence about the Ritualists as a group, even though they didn’t really present what most people might call “a unified program” of scholarship. That term more readily suggests a unified science, a compact discipline in the philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s sense,4 but I think it is also possible to partake in sustained intellectual interaction without having scientific norms in mind. What we see among the Ritualists is a kind of intellectual cooperation natural among aesthetically oriented interpreters, Interpreting Together 191 not scientifically oriented explainers. For our story, then, the Ritualists become particularly important. the ritualists’ triangle Between 1903 and 1912 Harrison, Murray, and Cornford each published two major works—nothing particularly remarkable for productive scholars, except for the fact that all can still reward readers today.5 True, in most cases the Ritualists’ specific scholarly conclusions have been superseded, but their goals went beyond the particulars of...