John Ruskin

From Philosopedia

Ruskin, John (8 February 1819 - 20 January 1900)

Ruskin, a distinguished English critic and social theorist, was the virtual dictator of artistic opinion in England during the mid-19th century.

An only child in London, Ruskin had a mother who was a devout evangelical, and she intended her son for the Church. But Ruskin turned to the arts, studying art and poetry at King's College and Oxford. In Praeterita (1855), Ruskin related that by the age of fourteen, he had rejected the literal truth of the Bible:

• It had never entered into my head to doubt a word of the Bible, though I saw well enough already that its words were to be understood otherwise than I had been taught; but the more I believed it, the less it did me any good. It was all very well for Abraham to do what angels bid him, - so would I, if any angels bid me; but none had ever appeared to me that I knew of.

Ruskin credited his interest in geology with destroying his faith, unable to reconcile that science with such claims as the Flood.

His first work, Modern Painters (1843–1860, 5 volumes) began as a defense of J. M. W. Turner and held that art is a “universal language” based on national and individual integrity and morality. He applied the idea to architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851–1853). He also attacked the ugliness and waste of modern industrial England, proposing social reforms, some of which - old-age pensions, nationalization of education, organization of labor - are now widely accepted.

In 1870 Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor at Oxford, the first professor of art in England. “I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father’s house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions,” Ruskin declared. “Nor has the Church’s ardent ‘desire to depart, and be with Christ,’ ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.”

In 1860 Ruskin, a member of the Metaphysical Society, told Augustus Hare that he “believed nothing.” In later years he called himself “a Christian Catholic” (as distinct from the pagan Roman Catholics, but he included Huxley). Although he never went to church, he said he took “the Lord’s Supper.” According to his biographer, Sir E. Z. Cook, what Ruskin meant was that he dined at his own table. According to Joseph McCabe, Ruskin was never a Christian and, in fact, lost his mental balance occasionally in later years.

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