New Approaches to Ruskin (Routledge Revivals)

Thirteen Essays

Robert Hewison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317569299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The study of Ruskin's work and influence is now a feature of several critical disciplines. New Approaches to Ruskin, first published in 1981, reflects this, gathering some of the most distinguished writers on Ruskin and joining them with others who have undertaken significant research in the field of Ruskin studies. The authors were all specially commissioned for this volume and were chosen to represent as wide a variety of approaches as possible to this key figure of nineteenth-century culture. This book is ideal for students of art history.

1

Ruskin’s Testament of his Boyhood Faith:
Sermons on the Pentateuch

Van Akin Burd

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

I take pride in recalling that in 1954 I served the University of Illinois Press as a reader of Helen Gill Viljoen’s manuscript, Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage, and strongly urged its publication. In a review which I wrote later for the Modern Language Quarterly, I asserted that this book began a new era in Ruskin scholarship because Viljoen proved the danger in basing our view of Ruskin’s life primarily on his autobiography Praeterita and the Introductions which Ruskin’s editors, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, prepared early in this century for the Library Edition of his works, documenting as they did Ruskin’s own portrayal of the development of his mind. Viljoen intended this volume to serve not only as a study of Ruskin’s parents and hence a prelude to a full-scale biography of Ruskin which her death in 1974 prevented her from completing, but also as a demonstration of the need to tell his story contemporaneously from the Ruskin manuscripts, many of which were – and still are – unpublished.

Not until I had sorted through the papers which Viljoen bequeathed to me did I realize that during the same years that she was completing the Heritage, she was also editing the sermons on the Pentateuch which Ruskin had written as a boy of twelve and thirteen. The five little booklets which he had made for his fair copies of these sermons had been generally unknown to scholars because of the failure of his editors to list them properly in their bibliography of Ruskin’s manuscripts. W. G. Collingwood was familiar with at least one of the booklets, including in his Ruskin Relics (1903) a facsimile of a page from what we know now is the third volume of the set, a manuscript which had already been given to the Ruskin Museum in Coniston. Although Ruskin’s editors refer in one place to the books of his sermons (35. lxxx), they include in their listing of Ruskin’s notebooks only the one volume which Collingwood had used and which they now misdate 1827 (38.206). The other four volumes presumably were preserved at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home near Coniston, until the final dispersal of his papers in 1930 when these booklets made their way into the hands of the Rev. J.S. Ladd-Thomas, later the Dean of the School of Theology at Temple University, who acquired them as a gift from a friend living near Brantwood. After the death of Ladd-Thomas in 1959, Viljoen was given the booklets as a token of her friendship with the family. Combined with the volume in the Coniston Museum the five booklets made available to Viljoen the completed text of nineteen sermons and the rough draft of two more, constituting more than 40,000 words written on 94 leaves of manuscript. Viljoen left the four sermon books to the Pierpont Morgan Library where for the first time qualified scholars may study them. Unable to find a publisher for her edition of the sermons because of their specialized interest, she left with me her transcript of them and the Introduction, the latter consisting of 127 pages of typescript, which she had written for this work, hoping that I would share with readers of Ruskin her convictions about the importance of these sermons as a basis for understanding the growth of his religious thought.

The Sermons on the Pentateuch (as Helen Viljoen titles the series) provide the only contemporaneous record of the religious beliefs with which Ruskin had been indoctrinated during his boyhood and the quality of his response to this teaching. These sermons are not to be confused with the abstracts which he and his cousin Mary Richardson would compile of the sermons they had heard that morning in Beresford Chapel (35.72). Examinations of these abstracts in the homemade booklet of MS no. 11 of Ruskin’s juvenilia at Yale University shows that they are little more than fragmentary notes.¹ Compared to the abstracts, these sermons show by their length and content a growth in Ruskin’s power to sustain thought. They are written, not on a miscellany of topics such as one might expect to hear from the pulpit from Sunday to Sunday, but as a carefully organized commentary on events and characters in the Pentateuch and the laws which God gave to guide man’s conduct then and now. Each sermon is worked out with regard for the traditional principles of rhetoric and for the larger theme of the sermons as a whole.

In central concept, Viljoen writes in her introduction to her unpublished edition, ‘the Sermons develop the thesis that out of all-embracing knowledge, God gave laws and dealt with man in society antedating profane history so that instant needs were met by words and acts’ foreshadowing future events and containing instruction timelessly immediate.² She intended to present the sermons in four parts, the first to include the opening nine discourses which deal with the world before the flood, then the deluge and Noah’s fathership of post-diluvian mankind and events recorded in sacred history. Sermons X through XIII, an interpretation of the ceremonial laws given in Leviticus, make up Part II. Sermons XIV through XIX, dealing with the moral law of the Commandments delivered to Moses, constitute Part III. The last section, sermons XX and the uncompleted XXI, begin Ruskin’s analysis of the civil and judicial law of the Mosaic economy.³

In her study Viljoen corrects the errors of Ruskin’s editors E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn in misdating and misinterpreting his ‘sermon-books’ – another demonstration of the unreliability of the editorial apparatus in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s Works. The contents of the Sermons, she agrees, may not seem to tell us more about the religion of Ruskin’s youth than we knew from his autobiography Praeterita, that is, that Margaret Ruskin steeped her son’s childhood in her own Evangelical faith. His mother, he declares on the opening page of his autobiography, had it ‘deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me’ (35.13). His account of his daily study of the Bible and his list of the chapters he committed to memory are well known (35.40, 42). It was his mother’s ‘unquestioning evangelical aith in the literal truth of the Bible’ that placed him as a boy ‘in the presence of an unseen world’, a faith which set his ‘active analytic power early to work on the questions of conscience, free will, and responsibility’ (35.128). But, precisely, what did he believe? From the tenets of Evangelicism and Ruskin’s later statements, writers, including myself (WL.55–63), have conjectured answers. ‘But there is a great difference between conjecture and genuine knowledge,’ Viljoen reminds us; ‘between the abstract and the concrete; between the hostile and mocking, yet nostalgic, memories, of a man who had suffered because of the indoctrination of his youth – and the living faith of a boy, eloquently spoken through his very script’ (p. xi). The other notebooks of Ruskin’s juvenilia show the interests of this lively adolescent in drawing, mineralogy, writing poetry, and his studies with his tutors. Viljoen sees the Sermons as one more occupation of his youth in which he would show the reasonableness of his religious faith ‘without questioning his assumption that the whole truth of God was contained in his beliefs’ (p.lvii). In effect, these Sermons review what he had learned from his mother and pastors like Mr Burnet, and what he himself might some day preach as a Bishop – his father’s vision of him in the future.

The first of the main ideas which Viljoen finds in Ruskin’s Sermons, an analysis which I can only abstract here, adding some illustrations and comment from my own reading of the sermon books, is his belief in the truth and proper study of the Bible. A ‘book of divine origin’⁴ ‘drawn by the pen of inspiration’ (S1:5.13^v), as he describes the Bible in the Sermons, each word is an expression of Divinity as represented by the Old Testament Jehovah. The ‘signs and wonders’ recorded in the Bible are there for our instruction (S2:8.13^v). The study of the text should be conducted ‘line upon line, and precept upon precept’, as the guide which God gave us (52:8.12^V), ‘the very ground of our faith’ – to be ‘unqualifiedly’ accepted (S1:5.14^v). The more we thus examine and meditate upon the Bible, ‘the more we shall believe in the sanctity of its origin and the wisdom of its author’ (S2:7.6^V).

Although we must accept on faith those parts of the Bible ‘placed above our comprehension’ (S1:5.14^v), the Old Testament provides evidence ‘capable of proving the perfect truth of those statements’ (S2:6.2^V). God has shown himself when he repeated to Isaac the promise which he had first made to Abraham (S2:6.3^r); similarly he had assumed the form of man when he told Abraham of his proposal to destroy Sodom (S1:5.15^v). His appearance to Moses in the fiery bush left ‘no handle … for unbelief’ (S4:12.1^r). Further evidence comes from events in the lives of the patriarchs which serve as ‘a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path’ (S2:6.5^r): the apparent choice of Moses, for example, as God’s agent, since he never would have dared otherwise to deliver the Commandment against idolatry to ‘that whole assembly of more than three millions’ of his idol-loving followers if he had been ‘an imposter’ (S4:15.1 l^r). Miracles also testify to the Bible’s truth because they could have been worked only through God’s power (S2:8.10^r). It is ‘the obstinacy of the human heart’ which prevents men from recognizing the meaning of the Bible. If the young Ruskin doubted the truth of the Bible, he would consider himself worse than Pharaoh who refused to heed the miracles performed by Moses. ‘No, I know the nature of the God to whom the wonders recorded in the bible are ascribed, and if therefore I neglect to examine into them, my conduct is infinitely more reprehensible’ (S2:8.11^v, 12^r).

The Bible is not only a source of truth but also a history of mankind not otherwise available, the annals of profane history, as in Herodotus, not beginning until ‘nearly two thousand years later than the aera [sic] of the deluge’ (S1:2.5^r). In the Sermons, this history begins after the Creation and Fall, a period of wickedness and violence brought about through the intermarriage of the sons of Cain (children of the world and hence the authors of the arts in whose origin ‘we have no reason to be proud’ (S1:1.2^r)), and the daughters of Seth (children of the church). Seeing no abatement of vice in their progeny, God gave them a probation period of 120 years followed by one more opportunity for reform, the warning contained in the building of the ark. Their rejection of this warning, Ruskin declares, ‘is among the very strongest proofs on record, of the utter wickedness of the human soul’ (S1:2.3^r). Ruskin closes his second sermon with a disposal of the ‘infidel objections’ which have been raised against belief in the actuality of the flood (S1:2.4^r-6^V).

Ruskin’s account of this early history testifies to what he had called his early ‘active analytic power’ as he searches for answers to difficult questions. Words such as cherubim must be precisely defined. Exactly what is meant by saying that God set a mark on Cain (S1: l.l^r, 2^r)? Viljoen comments that the how’s and why’s seem incessant: how could Abraham have been a blessing to all nations when, under the dispensation, the blessing had been limited to one nation (S1: 5.15^V); why should Cain have been judged wicked in offering God the first fruits of his husbandry (S1: 1.2^r)? ‘Thus the Sermons served to express and to satisfy his own inquiring mind,’ Viljoen writes, ‘perhaps too highly trained for his own good when he was, at most, thirteen’ (p.lxii).

The third major theme which Viljoen finds in the Sermons is Ruskin’s perception of God as Father and of the Son as sacrifice, deeply-felt beliefs which make the Sermons a new source of insight into Ruskin’s later life. As a child he had already made the association between his Father on earth and the Father in heaven. ‘In the first place,’ he observes in his Sermons, approaching the Ten Commandments, ‘children are to be taught to reverence their earthly parents, must they not then much more be taught to reverence their heavenly parent. Nothing can be easier, than to lead the mind of the child from one to the other, … and fellowship will be found between the feelings of duty to the parent, and of duty towards God’ (S4:14.7^V). The deity of the Sermons is the Jehovah of the Pentateuch. Although ‘a kind and faithful Creator’ who always watches over the welfare of his people (S2:7.9^r), nevertheless this Father can be a god of wrath and ‘irresistible power’ when ‘obstinately braved’ (S2:8.1^r).

In the discourses devoted to the ceremonial laws set forth in Leviticus Ruskin stresses the law of sacrifice as the foundation of the Mosaic economy. The sacrifice of a lamb ‘pure, … a male without blemish’ on whose head the penitent places his hand ‘in order to communicate the load of his sins and his wickedness to the animal’ (S3:10.9^V, 9^r) is a harbinger of a later economy in which man may find atonement through God’s sacrifice of Christ. The sacrifice, according to Mosaic law, must be appropriate. The highest of God’s creations, man, would not have been appropriate for this later economy because the Almighty had created him, along with the other creatures of nature, by fiat (S3:10.1 3^r). The only choice was the Father’s only son who could make atonement for our sinfulness, not necessarily for any particular sin, but for ‘the weakness of the carnality itself, which was continual and which required continual offering’ (S3:11.14^v).

The law of Moses, as Ruskin reads it, could not compel a man to bring his sacrifice to the altar, but disobedience is the sin which will sow the whirlwind of selfishness, pride, passion, and obstinacy which we see in transgressors. The young Ruskin, who took such pleasure in summer travels, recognizes that even the novelty of change of situation is no substitute for the satisfactions of obedience. ‘It is true, that in this life, a monotonous succession of the same objects, and ideas would produce lassitude in the mind … and we find likewise that a change … will give a new spring to the nerves.’ He reminds us, however, that throughout these changes of scene we carry our native depravity. ‘No, there must not only be a new scene, but also a new eye to behold it’ (S3:9.4^V, 5^r).

Ruskin’s stress on the Law of Sacrifice makes the Sermons extraordinaril...